ROS package version conflict

[jbarnett-bdai]

Not sure if I should ask this here, or on a ROS board somewhere: we're using ROS2 Humble, and the apt package for pinocchio was changed from version 2 to 3, causing some breakage. Could the new version be packaged instead as pinocchio3, so that both versions can exist in tandem, giving users a chance to migrate easily without breaking? Thanks!

[nim65s]

Hi,

Can you provide an example of this beeing done for another package in the ROS 2 ecosystem ?

[jbarnett-bdai]

The closest I can find in ROS2 is ros-humble-tinyxml-vendor vs. ros-humble-tinyxml2-vendor, but it's fairly common among debian-based distributions, for instance python2 and python3 coexisted for several years.

[nim65s]

tinyxml and tinyxml2 are different projects (the latest version of the first is 2.6.2, but the second started at 2.0.0 and never had 2.6.2), so both projects can't have the same name.

The thing is I'm not sure this will be allowed by ROS maintainers. If you can tell us that it will be OK for them, I can try to open a PR for a pinocchio2 package. This must be very limited in time, though: the python 2/3 thing you speak of is the biggest fiasco in software management history, and we certainly don't want to reproduce anything like that. I will not accept to maintain pinocchio2 for more than one year. The obvious advice here is to keep up to date with your dependencies as soon as possible, and not dig in your technical debt.

Generally speaking, if any version upgrade is an issue for you, you should probably consider using version pinning. Sadly, apt is not great for that, and ROS does not retain older binaries:

$ apt-cache policy ros-humble-pinocchio
ros-humble-pinocchio:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 3.3.0-1jammy.20241209.140126
  Version table:
     3.3.0-1jammy.20241209.140126 500
        500 http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu jammy/main amd64 Packages

It would work with robotpkg, and robotpkg binaries are compatible with those from ROS, as long as you don't have the same package from both sources:

$ apt-cache policy robotpkg-py310-pinocchio
robotpkg-py310-pinocchio:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 3.3.0
  Version table:
     3.3.0 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     3.2.0 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     3.0.0r1 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     3.0.0 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.7.0 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.21 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.20 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.17 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.15 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.14 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.10 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.9 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.8r1 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.8 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.7 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages
     2.6.5 500
        500 http://robotpkg.openrobots.org/packages/debian/pub jammy/robotpkg amd64 Packages

Therefore you can eg. apt install robotpkg-py310-pinocchio=2.7.0 robotpkg-pinocchio=2.7.0 robotpkg-py310-hpp-fcl=2.4.4 robotpkg-hpp-fcl=2.4.4 robotpkg-py310-eigenpy=3.5.0 && apt remove ros-humble-eigenpy but that's a bit tedious. And if you have other dependencies which need eigenpy or hpp-fcl, this won't work for you. For that case, robotpkg also provide binaries for some ROS package, but there is limited support.

Other package managers do a better job for this, but with ROS there are few options (only nix-ros-overlay and robostack I think), and they are not supported by OSRF.

[jbarnett-bdai]

Thanks, pinning is exactly what I did to resolve this for us; naming was just a suggestion for avoiding the compatibility problem altogether. Agreed that python migration was messy, but it wasn't a problem created by having both packages easily available.

ROS does retain older binaries, at snapshots.ros.org, and the following in /etc/apt/preferences.d will use the snapshot only for the required package:

Package: *
Pin: origin "snapshots.ros.org"
Pin-Priority: 50

Package: ros-humble-pinocchio
Pin: origin "snapshots.ros.org"
Pin-Priority: 1000

I'm fine with continuing as things are now; thanks for the quick responses!

[jbarnett-bdai]

Also, for anyone stumbling on this trying to use ROS snapshots, see https://wiki.ros.org/SnapshotRepository

[nim65s]

Great, thanks for letting us now the situation is fine for you, and for providing the snapshot info, example, and reference !