[Rock-dev] PCL version in Rock

[Sylvain Joyeux]

> Whether we use Git or Tarball is orthogonal to the question if we should update to a newer PCL version, right?

That is exactly my point.

> What's the usual process in Rock for this sort of thing?

Happens so rarely that there is no "usual process". IMO, for minor
revisions (1.7.1 vs 1.7.2), I would directly go for a pull request.
For more major changes, ask on rock-users, if there is no opposition,
do it on master and advertise the change for the next release.

Sylvain

On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 1:49 PM, Martin Günther <martin.guenther at dfki.de> wrote:
> Hi Sylvain,
>
> On Wed, 16 Mar 2016 12:46:49 -0300
> Sylvain Joyeux <bir.sylvain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If we were to use the git, we probably would use the latest released
>> PCL version, which would not really help with the "did not get
>> updated" situation. It would indeed improve the "override-ability".
>> But by having everyone "update" privately, Rock as a whole loses.
>
> I'm not sure whether I got your point. Whether we use Git or Tarball is
> orthogonal to the question if we should update to a newer PCL version,
> right?
>
>> Updates to external packages like this usually require someone to push
>> for it, because if noone wants it, then noone will bother to check
>> whether the new PCL version(s) have backward compatibility issues
>> (thus breaking other people's code), and noone will bother push to get
>> it updated.
>>
>> Completely hypothetically: reasons why there has not been such a push
>> might be that 1.7.1 -> 1.7.2 does not seem as huge as you are making
>> it sound (at least according to
>> https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl/releases). I.e. if you had
>> code working on 1.7.1, 1.7.2 is not a major improvement to you. And
>> that since Ubuntu 15.04, pcl is provided by binary packaged (which are
>> packaging 1.7.2).
>>
>> Ironically, the fact that 1.7.2 is mainly a bugfix release means that
>> we could pretty easily update ... but that's up to the PCL users to
>> push for that change (which you are doing right now, thanks !)
>
> Completely agree. There are no killer features even in current
> PCL master that 1.7.1 is lacking (for my use cases); on the other hand,
> there have been 1000 commits between 1.7.1 and 1.7.2, and 800 more since
> then. Most of them are bugfixes, but it would be nice to use them. I
> regularly run into PCL bugs that have already been fixed since 1.7.1,
> so I have to work around them to make my code run with 1.7.1.
>
> I'm not sure how I would go about checking if a PCL update would break
> *other people's* code. If everyone agrees the *next* version of Rock
> should upgrade to PCL 1.7.2, we should probably announce that on
> rock-users and implore everyone to test their code before that next
> version is released, right? What's the usual process in Rock for this
> sort of thing?
>
> Best wishes,
> Martin
>
> --
> Dipl.-Inf. Martin Günther
> Researcher
>
> DFKI GmbH
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