Explore direct packaging of ROS dependencies and source code

[quantum9Innovation]

We should also explore a complete Nix environment setup that directly builds entire ROS distributions, such as the infrastructure presented by Clearpath Robotics ¹. nix-ros-overlay expressions could be used as a standalone input instead of importing the entire repository as an overlay on top of nixpkgs and a Nix-first build infrastructure can be developed. This is an active area of research, so we expect a separate whitepaper to be published that covers the theoretical groundwork for such a system after it has been properly formulated.

Footnotes

1. Clearpath Robotics: clearpathrobotics/nix-ros-base, https://github.com/clearpathrobotics/nix-ros-overlay ↩