Announcement: friendly mantainance fork at https://github.com/fishbotics/urchin/

[traversaro]

Hello everyone! I am helping mantain a library (https://github.com/icub-tech-iit/urdf-modifiers) that depends on urdfpy, and I am the mantainer of the urdfpy recipe on conda-forge. Unfortunatly, it is currently difficult to urdfpy with pip due to incompatibility with recent versions of Python and numpy (see #23 and #24).

Due to the lack of response from urdfpy mantainers, I created a friendly mantainance fork of this library at https://github.com/ami-iit/murdfpy/, with the latest fixes from @johannespitz and @fishbotics integrated (thanks a lot!), and I released it and made it available on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/murdfpy/ Actually, after opening this issue I switched to use/help https://github.com/fishbotics/urchin/ .

The slight change of name was made to be able to upload the package to PyPI, but the API is exactly the same, to use you just need to change urdfpy to urchin, i.e. from urdfpy import URDF to from urchinimport URDF.

If the urdfpy mantainers come back to mantain the library, I will be happy to take the friendly fork down, but as long as there is no reply from them, feel free to use it.

[traversaro]

fyi to possible interested users: @adamconkey @thesofakillers

[traversaro]

Exactly the second after opening this issue, I noticed that another similar fork exists at https://github.com/fishbotics/urchin/ . @fishbotics I guess the spirit of your fork is the same, right? So probably I can bring down murdfpy and just point users to urchin ?

[fishbotics]

Yes! It seems that @mmatl is no longer maintaining this package, so I forked it awhile ago to make urchin. So far, the changes have been fairly minimal (unpinned dependencies, the ability to load the kinematics without loading the meshes), but I am open to discussing future directions (perhaps in that repo instead).

@traversaro, I would be happy to make you a co-maintainer of the fork if you like. I imagine having a few people helping out will keep it from meeting a similar fate in the future.

FWIW, urdfpy (and thus urchin) depends on @mmatl's other popular package PyRender, which also appears to be unmaintained and has stale dependencies. I did the same thing with that package to make Pyribbit (https://github.com/fishbotics/pyribbit).

[adamconkey]

Thanks @fishbotics and @traversaro, this is helpful to know the lay of the land of these packages. What do you suppose would be prospect of @mmatl adding maintainers to this package? I always find it a little confusing when unmaintained packages start getting passed around under different names.

That being said, I'll follow along on whatever fork you guys decide to maintain. I primarily use this package for lightweight visualization/debugging without having to fire up ROS infrastructure. If there is well-defined dev that could make that task easier and more informative, I'd be happy to try to help in my spare time.

[traversaro]

@traversaro, I would be happy to make you a co-maintainer of the fork if you like. I imagine having a few people helping out will keep it from meeting a similar fate in the future.

Great, I would be happy to be a co-maintainer. In my fork I also added GitHub Actions support for running the tests and automatically adding wheels PyPI for any new tag (see https://github.com/ami-iit/murdfpy/blob/0.0.23/.github/workflows/python-package.yml and https://github.com/ami-iit/murdfpy/blob/0.0.23/.github/workflows/publish-to-test-pypi.yml), if you like I can submit them as PR to pyribbit and urchin.

[traversaro]

In the meanwhile, I will redirect users from murdfpy to urchin.

[traversaro]

I renamed the issue for visibility.

[traversaro]

@fishbotics can you enable issues in https://github.com/fishbotics/urchin ? I wanted to open a discussion related to urchin, but I could not (I guess it was disabled when it was just a fork of urdfpy). Thanks!

[fishbotics]

@traversaro : added issues and made you a co-maintainer