ROS-Industrial Migration to Catkin

[Shaun Edwards]

All,

As was promised in our roadmap (Hydro Release), we will be transitioning ROS-Industrial to catkin. Over the next few weeks we will be making this transition.  If all goes well, the transition will be committed to the ROS-Industrial trunk, only.  Keeping with our philosophy of stable release branches, the groovy release will remain under rosmake.

For those who aren't aware, catkin is a new build system that replaces the familiar rosmake command.  The catkin build tool provides new and important functionality.  However, it does present a learning curve to users who are familiar with rosmake.  I would encourage people to look at the catkin tutorials to learn how to use catkin (especially those building from source).

If anybody has any concerns, please let me know.

Shaun

[Zoss, Jeremy K.]

Shaun,

 

A few questions / comments:

 

1) Are we also moving to a new repository layout and/or transitioning to github?

 

2) The transition will require a different build process for packages still under rosbuild and those under catkin.  We may not be able to convert all our packages to catkin, as some high-level packages (e.g. robot arm_nav packages) may depend on core ROS packages that have not yet been "upgraded".  It may be worth doing a survey to see what packages we CAN upgrade, and what must still be held back due to rosbuild dependencies.

 

3) Traditional rosbuild-based packages can depend on catkin (but not vice-versa).  So, changes to these core libraries should increase the options for end-users / integrators, but should not FORCE them to upgrade.

 

- Jeremy

 

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From: swri-ros...@googlegroups.com [swri-ros...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Shaun Edwards [shaun....@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 2:50 PM
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Subject: [swri-ros-pkg-dev] ROS-Industrial Migration to Catkin

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[Shaun Edwards]

Jeremy,

See my answers:

1) Are we also moving to a new repository layout and/or transitioning to github?

The long term plan is to transition to github, but we will not do this as part of the catkin migration.

 

2) The transition will require a different build process for packages still under rosbuild and those under catkin.  We may not be able to convert all our packages to catkin, as some high-level packages (e.g. robot arm_nav packages) may depend on core ROS packages that have not yet been "upgraded".  It may be worth doing a survey to see what packages we CAN upgrade, and what must still be held back due to rosbuild dependencies.

Jorge, is in the process of evaluating what can be migrated and what can't.  Arm navigation packages will cause us some pain.  If we can't find an easy work around then we may consider upgrading the core arm navigation libraries as well.  This would be a change that we run past the larger ROS community since arm navigation is used by many others outside ROS-Industrial.

 

3) Traditional rosbuild-based packages can depend on catkin (but not vice-versa).  So, changes to these core libraries should increase the options for end-users / integrators, but should not FORCE them to upgrade.

Agreed, those who depend on ROS-I binary packages (when they are released) won't notice a difference and will be able to use catkin or rosmake for their projects.  Those building from source may run into some issues, but there are tutorials that cover this workflow.  Also note, the groovy branch and binaries will remain untouched, so this change will only affect a small group of developers.