[ros-users] [Orocos-Dev] problems running recent KDL versions with ROS

[Wim Meeussen]

> How long will WillowGarage stick to the old kdl package in the geometry stack?
> Is there still a compelling reason why you do not want to use the orocos_kdl
> package in the orocos_kinematics_dynamics stack? How do you get bugfixes from
> the orocos_kdl package into the geometry/kdl package?

The kdl package currently lives in the geometry stack, together with a
number of other externally maintained libraries such as bullet and
eigen.  But since these libraries do not necessary follow the same
lifecycle, it makes sense to split them into different stacks. For
E-turtle we're hoping to transition the kdl package into its own
stack, with its own maintainer. This could mean a merge of the kdl and
the orocos_kdl package.

For D-turtle we use a tar of the kdl repository, created at the time
the geometry stack got feature-frozen. We can update this tar with
bugfixes, but we can't accept any new features into D-turtle kdl.
Since kdl trunk regulary adds or modifies features (e.g. solvers), we
can't just pull the latest and greatest version into D-turtle.  For
E-turtle we can pull in the latest version of kdl, as long as it's
backwards compatible with the D-turtle version of kdl.

Wim





Wim Meeussen
Willow Garage Inc.
<http://www.willowgarage.com)