@nuclearsandwich to give feedback on if we can / want to provide metadata for Ubuntu Xenial and Debian Stretch

Enabling additional distros we're not building means we have to decide how best to apply release patches for those distros. For rmw_implementations we add release time dependencies on the supported rmw implementation libraries. On bionic that's fastrtps and opensplice, but we don't build opensplice for Debian stretch to my knowledge. So does it make sense to generate metadata for a package whose dependencies aren't available? Does it make sense to do extra work to generate metadata for distributions we aren't primarily supporting?

I think there are fewer release patching discrepancies between bionic and xenial but if there are vendor packages that can no longer use the xenial system version but can use the bionic system version, that would be a possible divergence.

thanks @nuclearsandwich for the feedback

So does it make sense to generate metadata for a package whose dependencies aren't available? Does it make sense to do extra work to generate metadata for distributions we aren't primarily supporting?

Yeah that's a good point. No I don't think we should do extra work just to be able to generate metadata. We will get there eventually but it shouldnt be added to the tasklist of this release.

I think there are fewer release patching discrepancies between bionic and xenial but if there are vendor packages that can no longer use the xenial system version but can use the bionic system version, that would be a possible divergence.

At least for Bouncy, we require to be able to still be able to build from source so we shouldn't stop vendoring packages that are not available on xenial. So in this case that should be fine.