I can definitely empathize with you about the Macports and 32-bit/64-bit issues.  In fact, most of the stuff in the wiki is about making ROS and Macports play nice, which currently means universal variants and building ROS completely 32-bit.  My friend John got RViz working with the built-in wx and python that come from Apple, but I want to say there were some issues.

I would like to cut the Macports cord, but there are many, many dependencies that must be fulfilled at the moment.  I would love to see something similar to fink be successful again, it never made sense to me why binary distribution wouldn't work great on OS X.  I think another way ROS could be much more OS X compatible would be to move away from wx (Carbon dependency drives many 32-bit issues). I know that moving to Qt was discussed at some point, and I really think that would be a worth wild move, because I have been very impressed with the Qt framework's portability and consistency, though I recognize the amount of effort involved in such a move.

I am interested to see if the changes in rosbuild2 and rosdep will ease these concerns as well.

--

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
William Woodall
Graduate Software Engineering
Auburn University
w@auburn.edu
wjwwood@gmail.com
williamjwoodall.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 11:06 PM, Ken Conley <kwc@willowgarage.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:53 PM, William Woodall <wjwwood@gmail.com> wrote:
> I made one, but I think on the ros.org wiki might be better in the end, also
> most of the patches are already in tickets and in the upstream svn for ros.

This is great work and thanks for taking the time to also document +
send nice, concise patches.  I'm looking forward to better support in
Electric for OS X.

Part of the challenge with OS X has been Macports, which has been a
moving target (as has the 32-bit -> 64-bit nastiness).  Our OS X
install was originally spec'd back in 10.4 days where the underlying
platform was quite different.  I'd be interested in hearing ideas of
how to revamp this (including cutting the Macports cord).  I made an
initial investigation into moving the Python libraries off of Macports
and use the builtin Python interpreter, but got hung up on some
integration issues.  With some upcoming changes to rosdep those issues
should be easier to solve.

cheers,
Ken


> Thanks,
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> William Woodall
> Graduate Software Engineering
> Auburn University
> w@auburn.edu
> wjwwood@gmail.com
> williamjwoodall.com
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 10:03 PM, Serge Stinckwich
> <serge.stinckwich@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 10:00 AM, William Woodall <wjwwood@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > I don't mind, but I can also give you access to mine so that you can
>> > edit it
>> > if you like, at some point we should probably put this some where else.
>>
>> Yes i think so. Could you create a ROX repository and move the wiki page
>> here ?
>> We will put also all the patches here also.
>>
>> --
>> Serge Stinckwich
>> UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
>> Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
>> http://doesnotunderstand.org/
>> _______________________________________________
>> ros-users mailing list
>> ros-users@code.ros.org
>> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> ros-users mailing list
> ros-users@code.ros.org
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>
>
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