On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 6:10 PM, Trevor Jay <tjay@cs.brown.edu> wrote:
> Actually, I think that answers my question. :) I was dense and didn't
> quite grok on first glance that this was the beginning of being able
> to include much less of ROS when making use of the message system.
> This is a really really good direction. This can't come to my
> distribution soon enough.

To emphasize that idea: a major goal of the current refactoring is to
make it easy to use libraries that depend on ROS message data
structures without pulling in any of the ROS communication system.  So
with Fuerte, you should start see some of your favorite ROS
functionality being repackaged in a minimal-dependency fashion for
reuse in other (e.g., non-ROS) systems.

We always had in mind the design pattern of writing ROS-agnostic
libraries with thin ROS wrappers, but that turned out to be difficult
(especially in C++) because of the way that the message data
structures were generated and packaged.  What Troy announced is the
latest (and greatest) in a year-long refactoring project that's
undoing some of our early design missteps.

	brian.