Consider moving the readme to a central position

[EmmanuelMess]

I think that the index would be improved by moving the readme to a central position on the overview.

Current:

Proposal:

[rkent]

Unfortunately many packages do not have a README, whereas all indexed packages have a package.xml which is the primary source for the summary. So these packages would basically show an empty main page.

So I don't think this is something we should do.

[EmmanuelMess]

Unfortunately many packages do not have a README, whereas all indexed packages have a package.xml which is the primary source for the summary. So these packages would basically show an empty main page.

I think this would make it so more packages feel a need to add a readme with some explanation. Similar to how readmes already work on GitHub.

For packages without a readme, you can replace the section with something like Github:

But, I also that the description should be duplicated under the package name, or moved up in the (proposed) sidebar.

[EmmanuelMess]

This recommendation is made to support the easier finding of information and documentation on packages.

[tfoote]

We can definitely increase the visibilty, but before we do that we should make a strong community wide push to increase the number of packages with readmes. There's a lot of content on the ROS wiki which is where we used to recommend the content be. And likely the best process would be to have a script which will harvest the wiki pages and open PRs on all the repos with the wiki content. This is something we've especially wanted to do before the ROS wiki goes EOL.

[EmmanuelMess]

As a small reminder from #500. IMO the ros.org/wiki should be deprecated (not deleted) ASAP so that people move the documentation to ROS2 recommended pages/links and there isn't a group of people cached by surprise by the noetic deprecation.

[tfoote]

I have added a deprecation warning:

[EmmanuelMess]

Might be a tiny bit glitchy:

http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Introduction

[tfoote]

Yeah, I missed a div close, and it got cached. I think it should clear out over time.