Clarification of "Balancing Stability and Feature Development"

[VladimirFokow]

Please, help me clarify some things about Balancing Stability and Feature Development in Moveit and ROS, particularly about the section:

"I want to use MoveIt from the main branch on ROS Humble but don't want to build it from the source"

1. I ran the following commands (according to this README, and this page)

   echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://github.com/moveit/moveit2_packages/raw/jammy-humble/ ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/moveit_moveit2_packages.list
   echo "yaml https://github.com/moveit/moveit2_packages/raw/jammy-humble/local.yaml humble" | sudo tee /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d/1-moveit_moveit2_packages.list
   
   sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && sudo apt install -y ros-humble-moveit

   Then I tried to follow the introductory tutorials, but it looks like the package moveit2_tutorials isn't installed. Also it doesn't find moveit_servo, and it looks like many other essential things are missing.

   Why aren't they available?
   How to make them available? - So that the binary installation isn't different from the building from source instructions.

2. Is this correct? If I want to install Moveit2 to use with ROS2 Humble, I currently have 3 (or more?) options:

   1. follow these instructions (build Moveit2-humble from source - which is a stable but outdated version of Moveit2)
   2. follow these instructions (build Moveit2-main from source - which is literally the main branch of Moveit2 github repo)
   3. follow instructions I wrote above - from the discussion
      (binary install of Moveit2. It's faster because we don't have to build it, but is unstable, and doesn't correspond to docs)
   4. Is there an option to apt install the stable moveit2-humble? To do this, would it just be enough to not run the above echo lines?

   About option (iii.): it installs not a humble branch of moveit2, but a very outdated main branch (as of many months ago), which may be outdated to the current main docs online; so it doesn't have actual corresponding docs to that specific version of main. Is it correct?

   For information, when installed with option (iii.),
   this hints that the installed version is from release "2.7.4":

   $ apt policy ros-humble-moveit
   ros-humble-moveit:
   Installed: 2.7.4-42-g92ca89dca-2023.08.10.02.16
   Candidate: 2.7.4-42-g92ca89dca-2023.08.10.02.16
   Version table:
   *** 2.7.4-42-g92ca89dca-2023.08.10.02.16 500
           500 https://github.com/moveit/moveit2_packages/raw/jammy-humble ./ Packages
           100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
       2.5.5-1jammy.20240404.154053 500
           500 http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu jammy/main amd64 Packages

   but currently, the latest release is 2.9.0. What am I misunderstanding?

   Is it possible to know the exact commit of moveit2 repository that is used when installed from binary?

3. The discussion says it is build "nightly":

   Debians for MoveIt from the main branch on all supported versions of ROS that is built nightly in GitHub Actions.

   Does "nightly" mean every 24 hours?
   I'm confused. The last commit and executed action workflows in that repo were 8 months ago.
   Is this information outdated?
   Is that repo abandoned?

4. Can these instructions and explanations be in the getting started guide in each docs version where they apply: humble, iron, rolling, etc?
   (to install MoveIt from binary so that it works with ROS2 Humble, and people can run the tutorials with it, and if any differences vs building from source, they are well-described)

[tylerjw]

Rolling has been broken for a while and no one at PickNik seems to care about it. That workaround with the apt packages built in CI stopped working months ago and is not supported.

The only supported workflow I know of for using the latest on main is to build from source.

[VladimirFokow]

Thank you for the update!