I guess this whole conversation deserves a proper SIG no ? There seem to be
a lot of interest and several things to talk about: standards, policies,
reports, software. Actually, just came across an ABI / API breakage site
for popular open source projects :
http://upstream-tracker.org/
Some of the ones we use in our ecosystem are there:
http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/assimp.html
http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/opencv.html
http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/pcl.html
http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/yaml-cpp.html


On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Dejan Pangercic
<dejan.pangercic@gmail.com>wrote:

> Thibault,
> any company if it can it will take open source implementation, at
> least as a baseline option. It can of course happen that they will
> later contact a developer to get add-on features. However for now they
> (Bosch is using ROS for research projects) are wary to use ROS since
> there is no connection to standardized code quality indicators at all.
> That of course being only one of the reasons.
>
> I will also say that we haven't started doing these metrics just
> because we get bored here. Obviously we talk to other industrial
> partners and ROScon participants and to have a way to quickly infer
> software quality, possibly against some industrial standard [1] was
> identified as one of the biggest needs. I know that ROS is still
> predominantly research community that often couldn't care less about
> such issues but that is also why we are not forcing them as the
> de-facto quality view.
>
>
> [1] -
> http://portal.automotive-his.de/images/pdf/SoftwareTest/his-sc-metriken.1.3.1_e.pdf
>
> D.
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:51 AM, Thibault Kruse <kruset@in.tum.de> wrote:
> >
> > On 24.09.2013 02:12, Dejan Pangercic wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Selling ROS (even for free) to a company is a marketing problem, it is
> >>> about
> >>> maintaining a community, a pretty website and advertising, finding
> >>> reference
> >>> customers speaking up for the product, and so on.
> >>
> >> Thibault this is unfortunately very wrong. Selling ROS is right now
> >> rather a technical problem. Say you have
> >> $10 available for your micro-controller. And that one has to be
> >> certified, has to support some sort of encryption to protect IP, etc.
> >> So you end up with the chip like this:
> >> http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc6462.pdf, note 266MHz. Now you go, put
> >> ROS on it and have it run drivers, task-executive, perception,
> >> planning and control software.
> >> Having metrics like this will not help us with getting ROS to scale to
> >> something like this but it will help us convince the industry that
> >> coding standards used in ROS are solid and would give us the code that
> >> would run on somewhat more powerful processor(s) - which industry
> >> would not have hard time to spend more money on.
> >>
> >>
> >> Also, we do not want to force anyone to use the metrics but it is for
> >> now the only way to (quickly) asses the quality of the code,
> >> especially if it has been orphaned due to the lack of human resource.
> >
> > Hi Dejan,
> >
> > given that you work at Robert Bosch LLC, you kind-of represent "the
> > industry", don't you (as opposed to academia)?
> > And if Bosch as a company would like a vendor to provide some code, maybe
> > Bosch can negotiate that directly?
> >
> > cheers,
> >   Thibault
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > ros-users mailing list
> > ros-users@code.ros.org
> > http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>
>
>
> --
> Dejan Pangercic
> Autonomous Technologies Group
> Robert Bosch LLC
> Office: +16505657403
> Cell: +16508610951
> E-Mail: dejan.pangercic@gmail.com
> WWW: http://ias.cs.tum.edu/people/pangercic
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