Releasing our package

The following command starts the release. The syntax of this command is as follows:

bloom-release --rosdistro <ros_distro> --track <ros_distro> repository_name
$ bloom-release --rosdistro kinetic --track kinetic mastering_ros_demo_pkg  

When this command is executed, it will go to the rosdistro (https://github.com/ros/rosdistro) package repository to get the package details. The rosdistro package in ROS contains an index file, which contains a list of all the packages in ROS. Currently, there is no index for our package because this is our first release, but we can add our package details to this index file called distributions.yaml.

The following message will be displayed when there is no reference of the package in rosdistro:

We should give the release repository in the terminal that is marked in red in the preceding screenshot. In this case, the URL was https://github.com/jocacace/demo_pkg-release:

In the upcoming steps, the wizard will ask for the repository name, upstream, URL, and so on. We can give these options and, finally, a pull request to rosdistro will be submitted, which is shown in the following screenshot:

The pull request for this package can be viewed at https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/15526.

If it is accepted, it will merge to kinetic/distribution.yaml, which contains the index of all packages in ROS.

The following screenshot displays the package as an index in kinetic/distribution.yaml:

After this step, we can confirm that the package is released and officially added to the ROS index.