On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Blaise Gassend <blaise@willowgarage.com> wrote:
> Jack,
>
> There seems to be a general disapproval among people here of having
> nodes access each other's private namespace (the one you get with ~).
> I'm not sure why, but that is one of the reasons why the wge100 driver
> does not output to its private namespace.
>
> The other reason (and in my opinion the more compelling reason) is that
> we try to have a standard topic name for each type of sensor. That way
> if you run a bunch of nodes that are made to work together, they will
> work together with no remapping at all. For example, if you have a
> single wge100 camera visible on your network, and you just run a wge100
> driver and an image_view, you should see images in the image_view. This
> behavior is unimportant for people who are building a system, but tries
> to lower the barrier to entry for people who are using ROS for the first
> time.
>
> As for the node name, roslaunch requires that you set the node name
> explicitely, so there isn't much point in having the driver pick a nice
> name for itself. I just put some default, fully expecting that some more
> informative name will be specified in the .launch file.
>
> Does this answer your question?

That helps. I'll need to think about the details some, but it sounds
like I should modify camera1394 to work more like wge100_camera.

I do need a camera name to use, but it sounds like overloading the
node name was not a good idea.

Thanks,
-- 
 joq