[Fedora Robotics] ROS Fuerte

[Rich Mattes]

On 06/11/2012 09:29 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
> On 06/11/2012 09:00 AM, Rich Mattes wrote:
>> * 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.
> *sigh* Okay. Maybe we can ask the ROS community to stop doing that, or
> at the very least, to consider releasing versioned source tarballs for
> the build underlay? (e.g. fuerte-base-underlay-src-3.tar.gz).

It looks like rosinstall is pulling all of the stacks directly from 
their corresponding *-release repositories at [1].  So they can more or 
less be updated at any time it seems.
>> * 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.
> Yeah. I thought about this too, but it seems to be something we can live
> with.
Yeah the more I think about it the more I lean towards using /usr/share 
and dealing with it as well.  It doesn't seem to be slowing things down 
all that much.

>> * 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.
> Well, I wasn't sure. I do know that a lot of the ROS tooling calls
> binaries on the assumption that they're in the stack dir, so I don't
> think we can drop those symlinks, and I wasn't sure initially if some of
> the libs were being dlopened at any point, so I just kept making those
> symlinks. I'm also trying to comply with the letter of the FHS on those
> items.
>
> It's clumsy, but that's because the ROS stack model is so... clumsy. I'm
> still not thrilled that the shared libraries aren't versioned.
REP 122 seems to indicate that this will be changing in the future, so 
maybe the ugliness of the stacks/ directory is only a temporary woe.

>> 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.
> Hopefully you will have better luck reaching them than I did before. :)
I sent a message with a bunch of questions off to the ros-users list[3], 
I'm hoping to get some feedback on some of these questions.


Rich

[1] https://github.com/wg-debs/
[2] http://ros.org/reps/rep-0122.html
[3] http://code.ros.org/lurker/message/20120616.014609.b2d729f5.en.html