[ros-users] progress on ROS on OS X

[Serge Stinckwich]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 11:09 PM, Brian Gerkey <gerkey at willowgarage.com> wrote:
> hi,
>
> Thanks to Stefan Schaal, who gave me a hard time last month for ROS
> having mediocre OS X support, especially given that I carry a MBPro, I
> can report on some progress.

Thank you Stefan&Brian for this effort !

> Wim and I started bringing up devel_electric builds of stacks on OS X.
>  The dashboard is here:
>  http://build.willowgarage.com/view/os-x/
> The stacks that we're currently building (or trying to build) are
> listed below.  More stacks are being added all the time, so check the
> dashboard above to see current status.
>
> These builds are testing the Electric development branch of each stack
> (often, but not always, trunk/default) against the Electric released
> versions of the stacks it depends on.  The machine the builds are
> running on is 10.6.x (Snow Leopard) and was bootstrapped according to
> the standard install instructions
> (http://www.ros.org/wiki/electric/Installation/OSX).
>
> I did *not* follow wjwwood's suggestion to configure MacPorts as
> strictly 32-bit (https://github.com/wjwwood/ros-osx/wiki).  As a
> result, I expect that we'll have trouble with anything using wx (e.g.,
> rviz).  In the future, we'll probably bring up a OS X 10.7 (Lion)
> machine, which reportedly will resolve these issues.  In the meantime,
> we can make progress on building all the non-wx stuff.
>
> The goal of these builds is to keep track of what works, and to
> prevent regressions.  A stack "works" when you can successfully
> `rosmake --rosdep-install -t <stack>`, which means that all system
> dependencies are correctly resolved, and everything builds and tests.
>
> How you can help:
> * If you're working on OS X, suggest stacks that you know to build
> that should be added to the list.
> * A lot of the work is in resolving system dependencies, in particular
> for things aren't available from MacPorts.  In those cases, we need
> "source rosdep" definitions.  Have a look at
> https://kforge.ros.org/rosrelease/viewvc/sourcedeps/ for examples.
> * If you get email from Hudson about an OS X failure, please have a
> look at it.  If you can't figure out what went wrong, forward it to me
> and we can dig into it together.

I think also that this is important to have continuous builds just to
check where are the problems

I was wondering recently if using pkgsrc instead of macports could be
a better solution for distributing ROS on OS X.
Pkgsrc is the NetBSD Packages Collection and there is an OS X version:
http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html
What is cool is that they also provide binary packages for several
platforms (not sure about OS X) and a quaterly stable release (not
daily updates like with Macports). There is more than 10000 packages
currently.

Regards,
-- 
Serge Stinckwich
UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
http://doesnotunderstand.org/