[ros-users] Fwd: ROS (robot operating system) ports [team?]

[Rene Ladan]

Hi,

I sent the below message to the FreeBSD ports list a month ago but no 
reply up to now... Are there people here interested in porting Fuerte 
(mostly the NXT stack + dependencies) to FreeBSD?

René

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Subject: ROS (robot operating system) ports [team?]
From: René Ladan <rene at freebsd.org>
To: freebsd ports <freebsd-ports at freebsd.org>
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Hi,

Some (somewhat brain dump mode) thoughts about the ROS (devel/ros*)
ports [1] below:

- are there people who would be interested in forming a team? Together
with Chromium, Xfce, the Dutch translations, and "real life" this
becomes a bit too much for one person (I guess I underestimated the
effort :( ). Although the currently ported release (1.4) is still
supported upstream, release 1.6 has been there for some months

- since the ROS ecosystem and therefore the units in which these are
packaged seem get more finegrained at each release (1.0, 1.2, .. 1.8
which should be out soon), the question arises whether to keep just
the software originally planned (devel/ros-tutorials and devel/ros-nxt
[2] + dependencies) or also the software split off (which means more
ports, more testing, and more repocopies).

- because of the nature of the software, all ports need to be updated
to the next release in one commit to avoid breakage, although new
ports could be committed earlier as long as they are not connected to
the build.

- a generally positive development is that each release decreases the
amount of third party software built-in (this depends on the status of
several Linux distributions), but that also means that some newly
required third party might not be ported to FreeBSD yet and thus even
more ports to maintain.

- there is a lot more ROS software out there (enough for around 2000
ports), but some of it is only useful when run on the robots intended.
Obviously way too much for one person.

[1] ftp://rene-ladan.nl/pub/ros-freebsd.pdf
[2] http://www.ros.org/wiki/nxt (ROS bindings for the LEGO NXT robot)

René