Releasing Packages

Releasing to the L-CAS Build Farm (Recommended Way)

1. Prepare you repository (changelogs and tags): This step involves creating changelogs from git log and then bumping the version and tagging the version (making a git release). More details in this simple guide. Usually this just involves the following steps:

   1. catkin_generate_changelog to generate Debian Changelogs (you may have to add --all, when no previous changelogs exist)
   2. add all the changelogs to be committed, e.g. find -name CHANGELOG.rst | xargs git add
   3. git commit -m "updated Changelogs" to commit the new logs
   4. catkin_prepare_release to bump the version number and tag the source with it (with --bump {major|minor|patch} to choose which version part to increase)

2. run bloom to create the debian files

   1. run bloom-release as described here, but using our own L-CAS distro by seeting ROSDISTRO_INDEX_URL=https://raw.github.com/lcas/rosdistro/master/index-v4.yaml. Usually you do something like this: ROSDISTRO_INDEX_URL=https://raw.github.com/lcas/rosdistro/master/index-v4.yaml bloom-release topological_navigation -t humble -r humble with humble replaced by whatever ROS distribution you are releasing for and topological_navigation replaced with the name of your repository as configured in https://github.com/LCAS/rosdistro
   2. at the end of this a PR will be created in https://github.com/LCAS/rosdistro which will be reviewed and once merged the packages will be build by our build farm.

Release to the official ROS rosdistro

Disclaimer: Usually you don't do this, but the software management team will release version that are considered stable to the official repos

Same steps as above, but the bloom-release command needs another environment variable to be defined:

ROSDISTRO_INDEX_URL=https://raw.github.com/ros/rosdistro/master/index.yaml bloom-release topological_navigation -r humble -t humble