Noetic on Jammy?

Question

Are there any known downsides of using the packages hosted at https://packages.ubuntu.com/, vs. those at http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu?

Some background: Noetic is only supported on Ubuntu Focal, by design. We'd like to run Noetic on Jammy.

I notice that https://packages.ubuntu.com/ hosts a bunch of apt packages like jammy/ros-desktop-full. I've installed that package into a container, and it seems to work fine (roscore starts, anyway). I'm surprised that I have never seen anyone suggest simply installing the Ubuntu metapackages (which seems much simpler).

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Originally posted by Rick Armstrong on ROS Answers with karma: 567 on 2022-05-06

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by lucasw on 2022-05-07:
See also #q399664 - I should update my answer there but what I've seen since is that ros-desktop-full and related works well- I've gone well beyond just running roscore but no serious stress tests yet. But it is missing a lot of standard stuff, some packages weren't ready in time for 22.04 (maybe 22.04.x will have them)- and a lot else isn't even in debian testing/unstable yet, so those require compiling, many packages require fixes to compile (mostly small ones, boost::placeholders::_1 comes up a lot)- which then ought to get upstreamed into noetic sources or land in ros-o and eventually may become available in 22.04 apt packages.

Answer 1

I'm surprised that I have never seen anyone suggest simply installing the Ubuntu metapackages (which seems much simpler).

Because of wiki/UpstreamPackages.

And see also “upstream packages” increasingly becoming a problem on ROS Discourse.

We'd like to run Noetic on Jammy.

The official recommendation for this sort of scenario (ie: running ROS on an unsupported OS) would be to use Docker. Or build from source.

Unofficially, there is an effort ongoing to enable building Noetic on > Ubuntu 20.04: ros-o. This does not provide binary packages, so you'd have to build from source for now.

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Originally posted by gvdhoorn with karma: 86574 on 2022-05-07

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by Rick Armstrong on 2022-05-07:
Thanks for taking the time to answer; there's a great deal of information there to help us keep from "stepping in it". BTW, I think our motivation for attempting to run on Jammy is so that we can use Python 3.10. At first blush, I thought "sure, why not?", but I will now circle-back and really understand what we're trying to achieve.

Comment by gvdhoorn on 2022-05-07:
Just to make sure: I merely answered your question as to why these packages aren't recommended more (often).

You could have legitimate reasons for wanting to use them. That would be something else.

re: Python 3.10: that should be possible if you build things from source. Success would depend on whether Python 3.10 has deprecated (or finally removed) certain things.

Again: I'm not telling you not to use the upstream packages, but I feel you need to be aware of the pros-and-cons before concluding "roscore started, so it seems they work".