[ros-users] Ros on Windows

[Daniel Stonier]

On 3 April 2011 07:19, Jonathan Bohren <jbohren at willowgarage.com> wrote:
> All,
> I was looking at the documentation for getting ROS running on Windows, and
> it was mentioned somewhere that one of the issues is that there's no
> open-source dependency management on Windows. After a brief search, I came
> across a new (very new) MS-supported initiative called "CoApp" (Common
> Application Publishing Platform). It's basically a package manager for
> open-source software on Windows. It seems like they're still in the very
> early stages of designing the system, but it's clear that they've both put a
> lot of thought into it already and have the experience and support to
> actually make it a reality.
> Has anyone looked into this already? It seems like it could really be a boon
> for the development of an easy and viable ROS environment on Windows (since
> we've all been spoiled by the debian package manager), and if anyone is
> interested, it might be worth getting involved in their design discussions.
> For more info,
> see: http://coapp.org/ and http://coapp.org/Getting_Started/CoApp_Project_Governance
> best,
> -j

I ran across this about a year ago. It's odd, there's no reason
windows couldn't build on such a concept as its certainly not rocket
science, but I think Garret's got his work cut out for him. I think
alot of people, myself included, are on the fence waiting. It's hard
to give it a full vote of confidence for a few reasons, most
especially the presence of MS behind the scenes. If that backing
suddenly disappears, the lead developer loses his time to work on the
project and where will it go from there? With so many people sitting
on the fence and with the rest of the windows culture mostly oblivious
of the benefits of such a framework, I think that is going to make it
hard for him to reach critical mass, something it needs to not only
build, but maintain such an endeavour. Long run, if you want to build
complicated systems, its mostly just easier to move to a platform
without such massive hurdles.

The other big problem for him is porting. Windows porting takes more
effort than all the other ports combined. Getting a decent part of the
open source community to really invest in that will be difficult. Even
just looking at ros packages, most need alot of work because rarely do
open source people write with windows in mind. Only takes one package
in the chain not to do so and alot of functionality is unavailable.

Not meaning to discourage anyone though! It may well be useful even if
it can only support a few core fundamental packages, much like
mingw_cross is currently doing and if anyone wishes to pursue it
further, by all means. For the moment though, we'll just be
concentrating on getting the ros framework up and running along with
the capability to write some standalone'ish (monitoring/managing etc)
programs running.

Regards,
Daniel.

> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 4:49 AM, Daniel Stonier <d.stonier at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi ros users,
>> Ok, something more of an official announcement for
>> the win-ros-pkg repository.
>>
>> We have a mingw compiled ros working (minimally for windows) and also
>> started a stack to handle development of the tools and utilities. Some links
>> if you are interested in diving in::
>>
>> Some tutorials
>>
>> http://www.ros.org/wiki/diamondback/Installation/Windows
>> http://www.ros.org/wiki/win_ros
>> http://www.ros.org/wiki/mingw_cross/Tutorials/Mingw%20Build%20Environment
>> http://www.ros.org/wiki/win_ros/Tutorials/Mingw%20Runtime%20Environment
>> http://www.ros.org/wiki/win_ros/standalone_clients
>>
>> To contact us, bug reporting, feature requests:
>>
>> http://www.ros.org/wiki/win-ros-pkg/Contact
>>
>> Note that this is only early days yet - only the core packages have been
>> patched and we're also working on native msvc support, but any and all are
>> welcome to test and even better, contribute.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Daniel Stonier.
>> _______________________________________________
>> ros-users mailing list
>> ros-users at code.ros.org
>> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>>
>
>



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