[ros-users] Extending roslaunch

[Bill Morris]

Does anyone have any opinions on extending the roslaunch and its XML
format?

I would like to propose modifications to the <launch> tag by adding a
'name' and 'description' attributes or elements. Icon information might
also be nice as well, but isn't really as important. These will help
make it easier to figure out what your launch files do in a way that is
machine readable for other applications.

For example, one idea is to be able to double click on a launch file
have it start without a terminal, then it could call libnotify with the
name and description of the launch file that was started.

This would provide helpful feedback to the user as some launch files
take a while to actually start.

One issue I see is that libnotify/dbus seem designed to work on the
local machine and multi master will probably fail. One fix for this
might be to have roslaunch broadcast the Name and Description of each
launch file it starts on a topic. Another node could then bridge this
topic to libnotify. 

tl;dr
launch file as a desktop icon, click it, too long to start.
What is the easiest way to fix?

-- 
Bill Morris <bill at iheartengineering.com>
I Heart Engineering
http://www.iheartengineering.com
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