enalble display of binary sync status for release packages, such as the version in testing and the version in main for different arches

[firesurfer]

Our ci pipeline currently fails for rolling due to the missing pinocchio package:

  ERROR: the following rosdeps failed to install
    apt: command [apt-get install -y -qq ros-rolling-pinocchio] failed

When I understand their issue correctly they also currently disabled the ROS2 ci build:
stack-of-tasks/pinocchio#2175

In the ros index the package is shown as available for rolling:
https://index.ros.org/p/pinocchio/#rolling

but it is only available for jazzy and humble.

Could be related to: #425

[rkent]

rosindex relies on rosdistro to determine availability of packages. pinocchio is included in rolling there. So pinocchio is supposed to be part of the rolling distribution.

The fact that it isn't released in the rolling binaries is presumably because of difficulties in getting pinocchio to successfully build there.

So rosindex is working correctly according to its design intent. But perhaps you'd like to see some other behavior in rosindex, like detecting and reporting build difficulties?

For packages in ROS 1 there is a rosindex item showing continuous integration status, but that does not work for ROS 2 packages. I don't know much about the ROS 1 CI status, or how that got changed in ROS 2. If there was a straightforward way to query the ROS 2 build status for a package, that might be worth pursuing.

[firesurfer]

Ahh this makes sense. I was expecting a behavior like the one from the debian web front end of their package index. There are only packages listed that can be installed on a certain distro.

Any recommendation how to see which packages are released and installable in a certain ros distro ?

[rkent]

Sorry, I'm not enough of an expert on the ROS build system to give the best way to detect package availability. But I can see in http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu/dists/noble/main/binary-amd64/Packages that ros-jazzy-pinocchio is there but ros-rolling-pinocchio is not. So that file is one possible source of information.

[firesurfer]

Thanks a lot for your info @rkent

I leave this issue open as a feature request as from a user perspective this behavior of the index is at least in my opinion very confusing.

Feature request

Please indicate in the ros index page of each package if it is actually installable in the given distro !

[tfoote]

The status of packages can be queried from the repositories for example we do it and render it here: https://repo.ros2.org/status_page/ros_rolling_default.html?q=pinocchio

If you click on the first red box for pinocchio you can see that it's been trying to build every night and failing: https://build.ros2.org/view/Rbin_uN64/job/Rbin_uN64__pinocchio__ubuntu_noble_amd64__binary/

This is used for release management and isn't considered a stable API. And there's different reports per architecture: ala rhel https://repo.ros2.org/status_page/ros_rolling_rhel.html

This would be great to render into the index in the future. But it will require a new crawler process to collect the data. It would be great to add this in when we refactor ala #444