[ros-users] resolving open REP-0122 issues

[Ryan Gariepy]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 6:03 PM, Mac Mason <mac at cs.duke.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 9:26 PM, Jonathan Bohren
> <jonathan.bohren at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Under catkin, users appear to be required to know more CMake programming,
> > and less rosbuild manifest markup. I agree that it's better to use
> existing
> > standards than to create and maintain new ones, but the rosbuild
> > manifest.xml semantics are so very intuitive for people new to software
> > development (read: fresh graduate students). What I'm describing is the
> > notion of only having to declare which packages you're depending on, and
> all
> > of their cflags and ldflags will be used when building all parts your
> code.
> > I wouldn't expect it to be hard to make sure that Catkin provides a CMake
> > API similar to the rosbuild <depend> tags, and this can be optional,
> > allowing users to harness the full power of CMake if they choose.
> >
> > Someone said earlier that using Catkin will require learning more CMake,
> and
> > how that's a "good" thing. I'm not sure about that. I think the less
> people
> > need to learn to get their code up and running, the better. If they find
> > they need more flexibility then they still have all of CMake at their
> > disposal.
>
> This is my main concern with Catkin, as well. One of the great
> benefits of rosmake is that it's stupidly, ostentatiously,
> mind-blowingly, _simple_. It's not clear that it could be made any
> simpler without losing major functionality.
>
> Put another way: we ship documentation for 95% of the use cases for
> rosmake _inside the CMakeLists.txt that you get for free when you
> create a package_. (Minus the one sentence "put your dependencies in
> manifest.xml.") That file fits on one page. I used rosmake for more
> than a year before I learned a single thing about CMake, and without
> ever reading a single page of real documentation. This is a
> _profoundly_ rare (and awesome!) quality in any software system,
> particularly a build tool, and we lose it at our peril.
>
> It may easily be the case that Catkin could be made 95% as easy as
> rosmake; I don't know. One good two-page howto could probably solve
> this. (I haven't read the catkin docs; it may already be done!) The
> important thing here is _this cannot be forgotten, or done badly_.
>
> The ROS learning curve is already pretty steep. If the first step
> becomes "go learn a build system", we've just made it a lot steeper. I
> cannot believe that most of our users care, _at all_, which build tool
> we use; they want one they don't have to think about. (Other than
> ranting about "simplify whenever possible" on mailing lists, I
> certainly don't care!) If Catkin makes the release team's life 90%
> easier, and everybody else's life 5% harder, then it's a mistake,
> period.
>
+1 to all of the above. Our company has several hundred ROS users as
clients (more and more of whom get their first taste of Linux via ROS), and
it's nice that they're never confronted with the real build system unless
they choose to seek it out.

>
> If it takes an extra thirty minutes to learn how to build ROS packages
> ("makes my life 0.1% harder"), and all of my builds are 10% faster?
> Totally worth it!
>
>     --M
>
> --
> Julian "Mac" Mason      mac at cs.duke.edu      www.cs.duke.edu/~mac
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