Excellent feedback, Thanks everyone! ~Dereck “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” - Michelangelo On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Michael Gratton wrote: > On 26/03/13 03:10, Dave Hershberger wrote: > > I wish I had time to actually work on this right now. Failing that I > > will just suggest: > > > > Please don't break backwards compatibility. It makes unnecessary work > > for lots of people down the road, and doesn't save that much work now. > > It's hard enough migrating from one ROS release to the next already, > > let's not (knowingly) make it worse. > > +1! While ROS clearly has no API/ABI stability contracts from release to > release, the fewer breaking changes the better. Especially with such a > rapid release cycle. > > > My suggestion is to make a new message, called CompressedOccupancyGrid. > > It would look exactly like OccupancyGrid, but would have an "encoding" > > byte which would support PNG and maybe some other lossless encoding > > method that is more optimized for speed rather than compression size. > > (A simple run-length encoding might do pretty well.) > > > > Next step might be to make a library for subscribing/publishing > > OccupancyGrid and/or CompressedOccupancyGrid so that code doesn't need > > to be repeated and so nodes can have a consistent message API going > > forward. Maybe map publishers advertise "map" and "map/compressed" and > > only publish to whichever topic gets subscribed to. Subscribers would > > look for "map/compressed" and "map" and subscribe to compressed if > > available and uncompressed if not. This way new code would work with > > old code but be fast if possible. > > This sounds like the best approach to me. > > //Mike > > -- > Michael Gratton > UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering. > > > > _______________________________________________ > ros-users mailing list > ros-users@code.ros.org > https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users > >