What's the situation here?

[v4hn]

Hey @mikepurvis ,

what's the maintenance state of this package? Are you still the maintainer?
Did @RetroPie and or @gizmo98 take over the package in their forks?

OSRF provides a debian package of this module on packages.ros.org and it lists Mike as maintainer.
It also states that the package has version 1.6.1, which does not exist as far as I know...
It is used to teleoperate (among many other things, I'm sure) the PR2 robot.

I just found the (in my very very humble opinion) completely brain-damaged chmod -x /usr/sbin/bluetoothd in the sixad wrapper code, because this makes sixad fail to run correctly on the second machine on the PR2. The second machine mounts the first machines /usr path readonly and thus only gets to see the non-executable read-only file.
Now I would like to add a variable to /etc/default/sixad to skip this step and get the package pushed to packages.ros.org.

Any chance this could happen? Where would I pull-request the patch?

[mikepurvis]

Hi @v4hn,

Thanks for getting in touch. Background reading:

Sixad abandoned by its author: ros/rosdistro#6435 (comment)

Rationale for Clearpath to carry it forward: ros/rosdistro#9297 (comment)

PR that pulls version 1.6.1 onto packages.ros.org from my PPA: ros-infrastructure/reprepro-updater#19

However, the further wrinkle is that the DualShock 3 is now EOL, and making sixad work with the DS4 was deemed too much of a pain when other projects have covered this ground. So sixad is effectively now abandoned by us (Clearpath) as well, and we use ds4drv for robots which need a bluetooth gamepad.

If you'd like to fix or change something, I think your best bet would be to fork the repo from me, tag a new release, push it up to Launchpad, and then make your own PR to reprepro_updater. I will support this.

FYI @tfoote, @tonybaltovski

[v4hn]

Thanks for the quick response! ✨

However, the further wrinkle is that the DualShock 3 is now EOL,

Ah, I wasn't aware of that. That changes the situation quite a bit.

and making sixad work with the DS4 was deemed too much of a pain when other projects have covered this ground. So sixad is effectively now abandoned by us (Clearpath) as well, and we use ds4drv for robots which need a bluetooth gamepad.

As far as I can see, there is neither an official debian/ubuntu-, nor a ROS package for PS4 support available as a moment. Do you know of a ROS module that uses the ds4drv python package (I suppose you mean this one) and provides joy messages?

If you'd like to fix or change something, I think your best bet would be to fork the repo from me, tag a new release, push it up to Launchpad, and then make your own PR to reprepro_updater. I will support this.

I'm not sure I have time to do this, especially when the respective hardware is EOL.
But let's see.

[tonybaltovski]

I wouldn't mind helping maintain it. I was able to pair a DS4 controller with my fork but found ds4drv to be a quicker solution at the time.