Re: [ros-users] ROS usability

Hallo everybody,

just my 2 cents:

In my oppinion, the ROS core is fairly well documented and quite useable
- both for beginners and advanced users. The problem are in my oppinion
many of the packages. Most of the packages are more or less drivers for
robots or middleware things. But even e.g. on the usb camera side there
are at least 5 different drivers (see
http://www.iheartrobotics.com/2010/05/testing-ros-usb-camera-drivers.html and
http://pharos.ece.utexas.edu/wiki/index.php/How_to_Use_a_Webcam_in_ROS_with_the_gscam_Package
) - why the heck we do need at least 5 drivers for a simple thing like
capturing webcam pictures?! I know that there are different
requirements, but forking isn't always the best solution...

Additionally, many plugins aren't that usable. Are little example are
localization using 1 or 2 video cameras. viso2_ros doesn't need sse2,
which is a no-go for ARM-cpus which are getting more and more popular.
PTAM is at least compiling, but it even fail to correctly display the
video image (both on arm and on a normal x64 laptop). Sometimes it
remembers me about https://xkcd.com/927/ ...

Another problem is in my oppinion the library-hell problem. ROS packages
are tightly tied with specific library version (e.g. libboost) which
(roughly) exists only on one specific distro-version. This makes it
almost inpossible to use binary versions of ros on another distros.
Perhaps this can be solved that the binary packages depend on e.g.
"libboost-1.42 | roslibboost-groovy" - so either the distro-version or a
ros-own version can be used.

Best regards,
Michael Fritscher

--
ZfT - Zentrum für Telematik e.V.
Michael Fritscher
Allesgrundweg 12
97218 Gerbrunn
Tel: +49 (931) 3 29 29 54 - 21
Email: michael.fritscher@telematik-zentrum.de
Web: http://www.telematik-zentrum.de
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