[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Should we warn (new) users about difficulties with Python 3 and alternative Python interpreters?

[Asmodehn]

Just a few words to say that I appreciate and agree with the previous replies, ROS2 is python3, and ROS1 will have to move eventually to python3.

I also think we should warn that the only supported interpreter currently is CPython2.7 for ROS1.

However I think there is another reason for users and newcomers confusion coming to ROS, with python in other environment. One that hasnt been mentionned and needs to be addressed in ROS2 as well : 

In python you don't "make" anything, there is no build process, it is completely obsolete and hidden from the developer. Therefore newcomers have no idea and probably do not care about all these low level details, including dependencies and the like.

Python comes with its own set of problems and too few people have the resources and skills to manage both System and (portable) Python runtime environments. 

If ROS is to be multi lingual it also has to adopt the culture and paradigm of each programming language community, somehow...

That could also be a warning : ROS1 is primarily a C oriented framework, make sure you are familiar with C development and your system libraries. If not, here(put awesome tutorial link here) is a quick tutorial.

At least until everything becomes doable using standard python tools only, with a python workflow : pip install thing; python thing run.

And if you re interested about that last part let me know. I already worked on ways to do that, but I m currently looking for resources to be able to maintain what is working at http://github.com/pyros-dev and keep moving forward, so any help is welcome.





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