[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Next Generation ROS] Introduction of Persistent Systems to ROS2 initiative

Geoffrey Biggs ros.discourse at gmail.com
Wed Oct 31 02:10:45 UTC 2018



I applaud your willingness to put such a large quantity of resources into helping push ROS2 along.

I think there are a couple of things you should consider in your plan:

* Porting a package from ROS1 to ROS2 is an ideal opportunity to revise the implementation in major ways. You should coordinate with the package's developers to make sure you are not rushing ahead with just making it work in ROS2 and removing that chance from them in case they have plans.
* Just plain making a package work in ROS2 is useful, but you should do more than just port. You should take advantage of as much of the new capabilities allowed by ROS2 as possible. This means things like restructuring the design of nodes to be composable, taking advantage of QoS and deciding the best default QoS for each topic, using local parameters, and using read only parameters where it makes sense (when they become available). Once code is available working in ROS2 I think it is less likely that such restructuring will be done, so doing it as part of the porting process is valuable.
* Make sure the maintainer of the package is willing to also maintain and make ROS2 releases. If the maintainer is only interested in releasing for ROS1, then a ROS2 branch may get neglected.
* If you port an unmaintained package, you should be willing to take on maintainer responsibilities and do the releases for that package. (This would be a *great* thing to help with, by the way.)
* As you do your work, also keep an eye out for things to improve in the core libraries. Then post issues for them. Or, even better, make those improvements and post pull requests. It sounds like you have a lot of resources and devoting some of them to helping with ROS2 feature development would be much loved, I think.
* Consider giving some resources to porting tools to ROS2. As valuable as nodes are, tools are far more so.





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