[ros-users] progress on ROS on OS X

Tue Aug 2 17:43:54 UTC 2011

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 4:51 AM, William Woodall <wjwwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> You've basically described Homebrew, I have been wanting to take a look at
> Homebrew for a while, I think you would be surprised, if you don't already
> know, to see how close what you just laid out lines up with
> there philosophies.  Specifically, they don't try to manage python eggs,
> ruby gems, or perl modules because of pip/gem/cpan? do that already, and
> they don't encourage duplicating libraries and/or applications that are
> already OS X.  In addition Homebrew strives to be sudo free.  It does,
> however, have its package "scripts" written in Ruby, and I don't really know
> if that is a plus or minus =D.
> http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
> Either way it should be in the considerations, though I think pkgsrc is also
> a good option.

Thanks for the pointer; I'm checking it out now (I'm taking the
recommended action of uninstalling MacPorts first).

The philosophy is definitely in keeping with what I prefer.  My only
knocks so far are (1) the version provided by formulas isn't
immediately obvious and (2) they don't differentiate different OS X
versions, so I wonder what the future transition costs will be.

A third and more generic concern is that you probably shouldn't have
Homebrew and MacPorts both installed, so it will definitely require a
consensus in the ROS community.  My personal antipathy to MacPorts is
probably clear by now, but I defer to those like you who have gotten
further with integrating rviz and the like.

 - Ken

> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> William Woodall
> Graduate Software Engineering
> Auburn University
> w at auburn.edu
> wjwwood at gmail.com
> williamjwoodall.com
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 3:32 AM, Ken Conley <kwc at willowgarage.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 12:21 AM, Serge Stinckwich
>> <serge.stinckwich at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> In general, +1 to:
>>
>>  * moving away from macports
>>  * quarterly release, lots of packages
>>
>> It doesn't appear they provide binaries for OS X, though.
>>
>> I have a strawman proposal, which is multi-pronged:
>>
>>  1) migrate all Python* dependencies to use pip + the Apple Python
>> interpreter, which will take care of a small percentage of
>> dependencies.
>>  2) where possible, use MacOS-specific binaries for thirdparty
>> libraries (generalization of #1). This may not be possible to fully
>> automate.
>>  3) where available, use source rosdeps (e.g. eigen) provided by ROS.
>> These are generally dependencies that are not yet commonly available
>> via a package manager.
>>  4) either create new source rosdeps, or utilize something like pkgsrc
>> to provide remaining dependencies.
>>
>> i.e. the lesson learned from MacPorts is use to as much pure OS X as
>> possible, and also do as much integration on top of fixed/known
>> targets as possible.  Obviously #2 and #4 require much more thought to
>> expand out.
>>
>> - Ken
>>
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> > --
>> > Serge Stinckwich
>> > UMI UMMISCO 209 (IRD/UPMC), Hanoi, Vietnam
>> > Every DSL ends up being Smalltalk
>> > http://doesnotunderstand.org/
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > ros-users at code.ros.org
>> > https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>> >
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