Has no ros formula.

[ghost]

What is the point of using a package system, when no automatic dependency management takes place and the installation itself has to be done manually?

[wjwwood]

The intention was to use bloom to generate Formulae automatically for all the ROS packages, but for now this repository holds dependencies which Homebrew upstream will not or should not take. The point is to have all of the dependencies available so that building from source is possible.

[ghost]

Why can't the formula build from source for the user?

[wjwwood]

I don't understand your question. There are thousands of packages in ROS, each is built separately, so there isn't any one formula that could do all that. Instead the plan was to generate formula for packages similar to how we use bloom to generate deb files for each package in order to package them for Debian.

[ghost]

My point was that it is rather weird to have a ros tap that can't be used to install row core.
Currently the installation with homebrew as described in the wiki just uses it internally and requires a lot of manual user actions.

So I assumed that by

The point is to have all of the dependencies available so that building from source is possible.

you meant that the point of the repo was to have the dependencies ready for manual core installation from source.

While I would expect such an installation to be done by just calling:

brew tap ros/hydro
brew install ros-core

On a side note there are over 20 thousand homebrew formulas, a few more auto generated ones in their own tap should not matter that much ^^.

[wjwwood]

The intention is to have formula like ros-core eventually, it's just that nobody has had time to do it.

So for now this tap has the dependencies ROS needs to build from source until someone has time to do the formula generation.

homebrew/Homebrew doesn't take stuff like ROS, they encourage taps like homebrew/science, homebrew/games, etc...

[kyonifer]

I wonder if the scripts we've developed to generate macports ports with dependencies resolved would help at all. Obviously bloom is capable if someone had time to look into it, but we've worked out some of the issues specific to OS X packages (I'm not familiar enough with homebrew to know if they'd translate well).

[wjwwood]

They would probably be a good start, but honestly it would just take someone a week or two getting everything to a point that we could run the generation reliably for when new versions and distros come out.

[NikolausDemmel]

Some of the issues that came up when prototyping such a formula generator were discussed here: ros-infrastructure/bloom#254

I didn't have time to follow up yet though.