[Fedora Robotics] ROS Fuerte

[Rich Mattes]

On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Tom Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 06/07/2012 11:11 PM, Rich Mattes wrote:
> >
> > I've been following up with a few of the problem stacks over the past
> > week or so.  It looks like the next release of PCL will have the bits
> > that the wg-pcl repository includes and the main source distribution
> > doesn't[1].  According to the gazebo mailing list, the next release of
> > gazebo should follow suit and the ROS stack should depend on the source
> > distribution of gazebo and not a special patched version that is only
> > available from rosinstall or the wg ubuntu repositories[2].
>
> Great news! I saw the PCL emails, thank you so much for doing that. Will
> we still need to build two versions of PCL once this happens
> (admittedly, we could do this from within the same source package, I
> suppose), or will the Fedora system PCL be built against ROS?
>
> No problem.  I think we will be able to patch PCL with the missing pieces
once we want to build against ROS.  I made a diff last week, I think the
changes are only a few header files and some extra ROS-specific files
(manifest, message definitions, etc.)  If PCL-1.6 comes out with the fixes
before then, we'll be able to get those into f18


> > ROS groovy is due out around October[3], which is after the f18 feature
> > freeze, but I think we should make ROS an f18 feature and shoot for
> > getting fuerte included for the f18 release.  I'm willing to handle the
> > feature page and contribute to package submission, patching, and
> > reviewing this summer if everyone thinks this is a workable goal.
>
> Sure. I'm committed to this as well. I've gotten some more stacks
> working since last I checked in.
>

Great!  I will get the feature page started this week


> So far, the biggest block has been the fact that rviz uses a Ogre module
> that Fedora doesn't have (because that module depends on NVIDIA's
> non-free cg toolkit). I patched out the place where rviz uses the
> module, and things _seem_ to work fine without it, but I'm not really
> sure how rviz works so I can't be sure.
>

Gazebo has the same issue.  OGRE complains when it can't find the plugin,
but things seem to keep running (I can't tell if they're working or not, as
gazebo has some graphics issues on fedora.)  I can ping on them and ask
if/how they're using it, and whether or not we can get away with it.


> Aside from that, I finished all the deps needed for the nxt stack, then
> patched up the nxt stack to actually work against fuerte. Right now, I'm
> out at Southeast Linux Fest on an internet connection that is not much
> more than wet string and tin cans, but next week, I'll upload my current
> ROS packages.
>
>
Alright great.  I did run across a couple of little issues we should look
at while playing with the current ros packages:

* The build underlay we check out with rosinstall seems to change every so
often.  I checked it out on june 6, and it had been updated since you made
the first package.  We should figure out a way to monitor these changes.

* Some of the stacks are installing themselves under /usr/share.  Programs
like rosstack and rosmsg will find the messages and stacks when /usr/share
is on the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH, but I'm not sure if letting them traverse the
whole /usr/share tree as the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH is a great idea.  I think we
could maybe install everything in /usr/share/ros-fuerte instead of
/usr/share, and set the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH to that path out of the box.  But
then we run into issues when packages like PCL install themselves to
/usr/share and identify themselves as stacks, so maybe we just live with it.

* Are all of the symlinks to /usr/bin/* and /usr/lib{,64}/* ok?  Do we need
them since PATH and ld already know where to find things?  I went over the
guidelines and didn't see anything that said they weren't, but boy does it
seem clumsy.

I think we're making good progress, I'll try to reach out to the ROS
community and let them know what we're up to and if they have any
advice/feedback.

Rich
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