Re: [Fedora Robotics] ROS Packaging Roadmap
On 10/29/2012 02:30 PM, Rich Mattes wrote:
I should stop estimating timeframes for things, real life is way too
unpredictible.
I submitted rosdep, rospkg, rosinstall, and ros-release for review.
Ankur has handled reviewing rosinstall and rospkg. rosdep and
ros-release are still in progress.
My next step is going to be creating a python-catkin package, since it
looks like catkin is more or less a standalone python package that
doesn't really rely on ROS (just a folder from ros-release.) From
there, I'll start fixing up and posting the ros-fuerte packages I am
working on at [1].
Once some of the std_msgs and similar pacakges are in, I can patch PCL
to build against them and we'll have ended the PCL standalone
nightmare by growing a dependency on ROS.
My plan is to stick with Fuerte for f18 and put Groovy in f19 (maybe
even as a feature), but we can re-evaluate that as time goes on.
I also have a gazebo package for the latest release (1.2.5), I'll
update the review request[2] and submit packages for the new
dependencies it's grown since 1.0.1. Unfortunately, Gazebo doesn't
seem to render anything properly on my machine using nouveau or nvidia
drivers. Still getting to the bottom of that one I'm afraid...there's
an upstream bug report[3].
Hopefully I can get some of this done tonight before this hurricane
destroys the world...
Rich
[1] http://rmattes.fedorapeople.org/rospackages/
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=825409
[3]
https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/issue/143/rendering-issues-blank-world-...
It's been a while, I think it's probably a good time for a status update.
ros-release was recently reviewed, and python-rosdep is still pending
(but can move forward now). I've also submitted python-catkin for
review, but it still needs some attention as far as rpmlint output is
concerned.
I think it's still a good plan to stick with Fuerte in f18 for now. I
started to convert some of my fuerte packages to groovy, and a lot of
the ROS core infrastructure has changed. It seems like it will be much
more work to get groovy's catkin to use FHS paths for instance, I got
halfway through the ROS underlay packages before I reached an impasse
where catkin wouldn't detect all of the stacks it needed to build a
package no matter what I tried. I'm going to focus on fuerte for now,
and get back to groovy after the fuerte underlay is ready.
On the whole, I think it would be good to have one "supported" ROS
release per Fedora release. This can be Fuerte for fedora <=18, groovy
for f19, and maybe hydro for f20 if it's out. For users who want a
different ros release, we may be able to provide RPMs that install in
/opt via the copr repos once they're ready. It'd be similar to hosting
a PPA on ubuntu, and creating specs for installing to /opt is much
easier than worrying about the FHS. To allow for inteoperability, with
our Fedora "supported" ROS release I was thinking that the Fedora
versions of the ROS packages should be named like "ros-packagename", and
the ROS distro is determined by whatever's in ros-release. For the copr
repositories, the packages/srpms should be named ros-distro-packagename
explicitly. This will allow multiple ros distros in /opt, and won't
conflict the Fedora packages.
The gazebo rendering issue seems to have fixed itself around version 1.3
or so, which is good. There are still issues with bundled libraries
though. It looks like gazebo changes to ode have been going upstream,
so I'm hopeful a future release will provide compatibility and let us
remove the bundled ode from gazebo.
Rich