Use action-ros-ci to build from source

[scpeters]

🎉 New feature

Part of gazebo-tooling/action-gz-ci#80 and gazebo-tooling/release-tools#851

Summary

We currently don't have an easy way to run Ubuntu CI with multiple dependencies built from source either in Jenkins (gazebo-tooling/release-tools#851) or with action-gz-ci in a GitHub workflow (gazebo-tooling/action-gz-ci#80). This PR is a demonstration of the suggestion in gazebo-tooling/action-gz-ci#80 (comment) to use action-ros-ci to build and test multiple packages from source in a colcon workspace. This supersedes a previous draft PR #1648 targeting sdf16.

The Ubuntu CI from source workflow is added in 6075e0a with workflow_dispatch manual triggering, since I expect this CI job to initially be triggered manually for specific testing scenarios, not for every pull request or push to main. It has the following configuration:

• execute in rostooling/setup-ros-docker:ubuntu-resolute-latest container image
• use action-ros-ci with colcon workspace packages specified in vcs-repo-file-url
• use actions/checkout to checkout sdformat from the current branch rather than the branch specified in vcs-repo-file-url
• workflow_dispatch manual triggering with three input parameters:
  • packages-to-test: dependencies of these packages will be built, but only these packages will be tested (default sdformat)
  • vcs-repo-file: location of the VCS repo file from which the colcon workspace will be populated
  • vcs-repo-file-base: if relative, then interpret vcs-repo-file as a relative path within this github repo; if url interpret vcs-repo-file as a URL to the repo file (such as a link to a file in gazebosim/gazebodistro or a gist)

This commit also includes two vcs repo files:

• .github/ci/packages_up_to_sdformat.yaml (default values of vcs-repo-file and vcs-repo-file-base point to this file)
• `.github/ci/collection.yaml, which is equivalent to gazebodistro's collection-rotary.yaml

Backport Policy

• This is safe to backport to the following versions:
  • Jetty
  • Ionic
  • Harmonic
  • Fortress
• This should not be backported
• I am not sure
• Other (fill in yourself) we can backport this, but it will require changes to the repositories yaml files, so I think it should be done manually rather than with mergify

Test it

This workflow cannot be run using workflow_dispatch until it is merged to the main branch. To test before merging to main I replaced the workflow_dispatch trigger with push to this PR branch in 158833d.

Test with custom dependency branches

The resulting CI workflow run from 158833d successfully built and tested sdformat, but colcon test-result failed due to an issue with gz-tools that is fixed by gazebosim/gz-tools#172 (confirmed by the successful CI workflow run for 94519c4 that modifies packages_up_to_sdformat.yaml to use the gz-tools branch from gazebosim/gz-tools#172)

Test reverse dependencies against this branch

The package to test was changed to gz-physics and vcs-repo-filewas changed tocollection.yaml` in 1576cf1, resulting in the following CI workflow run that built and tested gz-physics but was marked as failed since the gz-tools branch was not updated:

• https://github.com/gazebosim/sdformat/actions/runs/28154710344/job/83380366892

Checklist

• Signed all commits for DCO
• Added a screen capture or video to the PR description that demonstrates the feature
• Added tests
• Added example and/or tutorial
• Updated documentation (as needed)
• Updated migration guide (as needed)
• Consider updating Python bindings (if the library has them)
• codecheck passed (See contributing)
• All tests passed (See test coverage)
• Updated Bazel files (if adding new files). Created an issue otherwise.
• While waiting for a review on your PR, please help review another open pull request to support the maintainers
• Was GenAI used to generate this PR? If so, make sure to add "Generated-by" to your commits. (See this policy for more info.)

Note to maintainers: Remember to use Squash-Merge and edit the commit message to match the pull request summary while retaining Signed-off-by and Generated-by messages.

Backports: If this is a backport, please use Rebase and Merge instead.

[scpeters]

This workflow cannot be run using workflow_dispatch until it is merged to the main branch. To test before merging to main I replaced the workflow_dispatch trigger with push to this PR branch

In addition to the tests listed in the PR description, I also merged the first commit of this PR to the default branch of my fork at scpeters@6075e0a. This allows running via workflow_dispatch.

test sdformat with packages_up_to_sdformat.yaml

The resulting CI workflow run from 158833d successfully built and tested sdformat, but colcon test-result failed due to an issue with gz-tools that is fixed by gazebosim/gz-tools#172

I reproduced this build in https://github.com/scpeters/sdformat/actions/runs/28207204166 using the following parameters:

I repeated this test with a gazebodistro yaml URL in https://github.com/scpeters/sdformat/actions/runs/28207305850 using the following parameters:

test gz-physics with collection.yaml

The package to test was changed to gz-physics and vcs-repo-filewas changed tocollection.yaml` in 1576cf1, resulting in the following CI workflow run that built and tested gz-physics but was marked as failed since the gz-tools branch was not updated:

I reproduced this build in https://github.com/scpeters/sdformat/actions/runs/28207241507 using the following parameters:

job listing screenshot

here's a screenshot of what the workflow history at https://github.com/scpeters/sdformat/actions/workflows/ci_dependencies_from_source.yaml looked like after starting these jobs: