[ros-users] progress on ROS on OS X

[Brian Gerkey]

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.

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.

        brian.

assimp
bond_core
bullet
common_msgs
common_rosdeps
diagnostics
driver_common
eigen
executive_smach
filters
geometry
image_common
nodelet_core
orocos_kinematics_dynamics
physics_ode
pluginlib
robot_model_tutorials
ros_comm
ros
ros_tutorials
rx
xacro