Release for bionic doesn't include #42

[dhood]

This PR doesn't seem to have made it into the packaged urdfdom_headers in bionic. The 1.0.0 tag on this repo doesn't seem to include this PR, and the source code zip for 1.0.0-1 listed at https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/amd64/liburdfdom-headers-dev doesn't include the strToDouble function, so there doesn't look to have been a new release since.

I know that this is released as an upstream ubuntu package, which brings some limitations on what/when it can be released, so there may be reasons that the version in bionic does not include that PR. But from @clalancette's comment referencing getting it in before melodic, I was expecting it to be included.

The issue it addresses is affecting a number of rviz users in a pretty severe way after upgrading to artful/bionic (see ros-visualization/rviz#1249, ros-visualization/rviz#1151), and is quite difficult to track down if you don't know to be looking at locales. Is it possible that it can be pushed to bionic somehow?

[dhood]

@j-rivero @clalancette Was a new release of urdfdom_headers considered for bionic? Would it be too late now?

[j-rivero]

@j-rivero @clalancette Was a new release of urdfdom_headers considered for bionic? Would it be too late now?

I'm afraid it was not, same version than in artful, upstream 1.0.0. Bionic is already released so it is too late to follow the normal course and the only option is to consider is to check if the problem falls into the Stable Release Update policy.

[dhood]

In your experience would it be covered by that policy? Essentially for machines with different locales, urdf parsing does not work, so it is high impact in the user-facing sense, but it's not a security-related bug or anything.

If it's not possible, we need to consider alternatives. Not sure if custom packaging would be feasible, or if we have to fallback to increased visibility of the issue and workaround. Since there is a workaround, the latter might be the most appropriate if the former is time-consuming, but I imagine it will still cost some users hours of debugging before they discover the workaround, no matter how visible we try to make it.

[clalancette]

I don't know Ubuntu's update policy in particular, but in general this should be a safe change to put into a stable update. It doesn't change any external API/ABI, and has some soak time now, so it should have a low chance of regressions. I'd suggest we attempt to get an update into Ubuntu before falling back to workarounds, though I don't know the process there. Maybe @j-rivero can give us a hint.

[j-rivero]

I don't know Ubuntu's update policy in particular, but in general this should be a safe change to put into a stable update. It doesn't change any external API/ABI, and has some soak time now, so it should have a low chance of regressions. I'd suggest we attempt to get an update into Ubuntu before falling back to workarounds, though I don't know the process there. Maybe @j-rivero can give us a hint.

Yes, the problem could be accepted as an SRU, not 100% sure but we can try it. The process of submitting is well described in the SRU page. You can get some inspiration from one of previous submissions: sdformat or urdfdom-headers for example. If you need my help to do it, I can try to allocate some time to do it next week,

[gavanderhoorn]

I know we're supposed to use Github's +1 feature for this, but going to use a comment to give it extra visiblity: it would be very much appreciated if a patch release could be done that includes #42. I'm in one of those countries where we use commas instead of dots, and although I'm not affected myself (using UTF-8), the nr of times we run into this now makes me come here and ask if something could be done, please :)

[simonschmeisser]

@clalancette are you working on this or anybody else?

[clalancette]

I'm not currently working on it, no. I probably won't have time for this in the near future, so if someone else wants to take up getting the update into Ubuntu, that would be appreciated. I'm happy to provide review/support as needed.

[simonschmeisser]

@clalancette could you do a new release 1.0.1 including the fix?

@j-rivero is updating to a patch release allowed as SRU? My interpretations is yes and it would be cleaner

I would then file a SRU bug report asking to update to 1.0.1

[clalancette]

@simonschmeisser I'm not the maintainer of this package, so I can't directly do the release. @scpeters would you mind doing a new release here just to make sure we have an official tag with the locale fixes?

[ldayot]

RViz doesn't display surfaces when LC_NUMERIC has no value.
Solved executing export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"

Source:
RViz does not show robot appearance (RViz tutorials: building from scratch) on answers.ros.org

[simonschmeisser]

@scpeters ping?

[scpeters]

Here's a draft of the release notes for a 1.1.0 release:

https://github.com/ros/urdfdom_headers/releases/tag/untagged-1fc2b13e629cb2aa7873