Hi Jose,sorry for the late reply. I had a longer discussion with Timo about this today.
* Jose Luis Rivero <jrivero@openrobotics.org> [2021-08-11 18:10]:
Development upstream (Open Robotics) is now focused on the new ignition-gazebo simulator (considered like the sucesor of Gazebo) which depends on the whole Ignition family of libraries, some of them are the same libraries (like ignition-transport) than the ones used by Gazebo.
Can you give some insights on how both versions compare feature wise? Is it a drop in replacement so everyone could/should switch? If not, when is that expected?
Problem is that both current versions of Gazebo and ignition-gazebo depend on different major versions of the ignition libraries (i.e gazebo11 used ign-transport8 and ignition-gazebo uses ign-transport11). Although upstream supports side by side installations of the Ignition family we have tried to have in Debian just one of them to make transitions easier and reduce the maintenance effort. I'm not sure if this problem can drive us to change our current practices.
I would see those libraries as independent project for now and would expect Debian to provide the latest versions by default once all software is compatible.
One of the robotics simulators, Gazebo version 11, is still supported upstream until 2025 but no longer releases new versions.
I'm not sure that is a good argument if there are no new versions. In general I would expect Debian to ship the latest version of a software so if I do a apt install gazebo, I would expect the latest version providing /usr/bin/gazebo.
On the other hand, If you think there is a large enough use base (looking at popcon I'm not sure), it may make sense to provide the old version with different package names. Note that if you want to support this you would probably need to patch the old version to be compatible with new libraries, compilers.. that do not support parallel installation.
So my view here would be to upload ignition-gazebo once it is ready and then see if supporting the old version makes sense.
Cheers Jochen
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