question: why is 'jasper' in rosdep?

[vermaete]

Hi,

Just a question to understand how ros and rosdistro is working.

'Jasper' is part of rosdep.
But it doesn't seem to be used as a dependency (https://index.ros.org/d/jasper/).
Well, at least it isn't used anymore.

Should it then be removed? Is there a policy about this?

[christianrauch]

You can search in GitHub for usages of that rosdep key in all package.xml.

For example, it is used here: https://github.com/ros-gbp/opencv3-release/blob/master/jade/package.xml. If no one is using that package (they shouldn't because the distro is EOL), it could be removed.

[mjcarroll]

Should it then be removed? Is there a policy about this?

It has been discussed ebore. We don't have a general policy for going through and pruning keys for end-of-life distributions. We have also discovered when removing keys that people have been using the rosdep key database even on end-of-life platforms for packages that aren't indexed/open-source. When we removed keys it impacted users negatively.

That being said, PRs removing keys that we definitely know are long-EOL would definitely be accepted. We are actually in the process of doing this for python2 keys.