| The own buildsystem/dependency system is not without precedent for open-source communities with large number of independent packages (https://developer.gnome.org/jhbuild/, https://www.pkgsrc.org/). The initial build system "rosbuild" was arguably a main reason ROS1 became successful, because it started making individual robotics packages developed in diverse academic environments reusable by other users (before, each lab had their own half-broken way of building/packaging software). The buildsystem in it's limited way also had a very low learning curve for junior developers (though not for people trying to package binaries). ROS1 was initially distributed as source packages, and that combined with a unified buildsystem led to a very low barrier for contributions. By installing ROS all users already had an environment set up in which they could easily modify sources packages from other packages created by people in other organizations, run with modifications and submit patches. Compare that to installing a library as a binary, suspecting a bug, and then starting to find out where to get the sources, how to build the sources, how to locally build against those sources, etc. The downside of this was of course packaging binaries was hell. But the bottom line was that this combination (making binary packaging and distribution very hard, while making dirty source builds very easy), was the winning ticket to create a vibrant open-source community with high cohesion and lots of contributions in academia. |