Python > 3.12?

[v4hn]

Hi @Tobias-Fischer @traversaro @wolfv , long time no see.

At ROS-O we've been working on python 3.13+ patches (not default in any builder yet) and someone just opened a discussion expressing their company's interest in this effort.
What is your stance here?

ROS noetic originally explicitly targeted Python 3.8.
Your robostack-noetic channel currently supports python 3.12.
My lab has run into the first cases where this is too old in direct project use (where general pixi support is a foundation we build on!).
Do you plan to add more patches for 3.13+ and keep pushing to robotstack-noetic?
Would you be interested in migrating to ros-o upstream repositories for such builds for the affected packages to address problems?
Alternatively, would it make sense to you to add a new channel robostack-roso?
After all we also include various minor patches on top of existing noetic releases by now (example repos files - not python 3.13 yet - here and here).

Greetings from Bremen!

[Tobias-Fischer]

Hi @v4hn - it's good to hear from you!

• In general, our intention is to keep supporting robostack-noetic. It's a lot easier now that AI agents help out in the process and automate a good chunk of a rebuild (and counteracts to some degree the limited time we have to maintain RoboStack overall). Plus for noetic, which doesn't get many package updates anymore, it's actually less work to maintain (the large number of) patches.
• Note that it's already trivial to (locally) build robostack for other Python versions - it's a one line change in

  ros-noetic/conda_build_config.yaml

  Line 58 in f78a785

  - 3.12.* *_cpython

  and a pixi run build.
• See Investigate support for building RoboStack distributions for multiple Python minor versions robostack.github.io#100 for a request to build for multiple Python versions – I'd really like to see that, and maybe @traversaro comes around my sccache hacky suggestion one day ;)
• I'd personally be happy to move to ros-o upstream repositories. This is now a lot easier since the last time we spoke, as we now use a snapshot yaml file similarly to what you have: https://github.com/RoboStack/ros-noetic/blob/main/rosdistro_snapshot.yaml - this is based on https://github.com/RoboStack/vinca/blob/master/vinca/snapshot.py. The Python script could be easily amended to allow for override repository files (from ros-o or elsewhere). It would be interesting to see how many of our patches are contained in the ros-o upstream repos (and how many are incompatible ...). Happy to explore the next time we do a full rebuild, and PRs are always very welcome!
• A separate robostack-roso channel sounds like a lot more work, as then we'd need to maintain two different versions unless I am missing something?

Greetings from somewhere over the Pacific Ocean ;).