[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [MoveIt!] MoveIt! Maintainer Meeting Recap - January 11 2019

[Bryce Willey via Discourse.ros.org]

# Agenda

* Kinematics Base API Rework

* MoveIt! 1.0 Release

* Policy for Contributors and Maintainers

* Clang-tidy Work

* Misc



# Attendees

* Dave Coleman

* Jorge Nicho

* Robert Haschke

* Mike Lautman

* Jon Binnery

* Gijs van der Hoorn

* Michael Grner

* Zak Kingston

* Bryce Willey

* Nathan Brooks

* Felix von Drigalski



## Kinematics Base API (Led by Robert Haschke)

  * Technical side: Regression in Melodic: KDL IK doesn't provide nice results

    * Assumption: things are a little slower causing earlier timeouts

  * The API for Kinematics isn't satisfactory (Comments are in Issue https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit/issues/1285)

  * Lots of cruft/redundancy

  * General agreement that it needs to change

  * However, it's an old API, with lots of plugin users.

  * Better documentation of the features are needed as well

  * Several use cases: 

    * any IK solution, close or not

    * closest as possible solutions

  * Some IK plugins won't support all of these options, maybe we expand the ability to check if a certain plugin has a certain feature

  * Major users: Descarte

* Redundant Kinematic's Base

  * Major discussion: do we break user' API unnecessarily?



## MoveIt! 1.0 Release: 

  * https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_lbjxy-jsF-rOpTkKUiL7vSprfU4jy67fjglUYRcMPw/edit#heading=h.s3mgzl2vy0b

  * ROS 2.0 is a giant API change

  * Do we want to be able to have MoveIt! 1.0 and 2.0 on the same computer?

    * Probably not

  * Who do we optimize for: People using MoveIt! and want it to 'just work', and those who can handle breaking changes and update

    * Mostly the latter: see https://discourse.ros.org/t/open-letter-to-moveit-community/6779 (under-optimizing for contributors)

  * ROS 2 will be hard, it's still missing a lot of features

    * It does have actions and parameters, but no parameter server

    * We will have 2 branches: master for ROS 1.0, and d***-devel for ROS 2.0

    * Beta ROS 2 release in December, release next year

  * Dave has been working getting resources to move to ROS 2.0, but the maintainers need to have a plan

  * Issue: someone has to write a ROS 2.0 branch, but while it's being written, there will be enough changes that they will have to catch up toWorkshop

  * Other big projects that have done the ROS 2 switch:

    * RViz: they did a hard fork for the new branch.

  * If someone wants to split off a branch, try to make sure you can isolate as many components as you can. It will be work in development for a long time.

  

## Policy for Contributors and Maintainers

  * Main difference: recognizes "Core Contributors" who might not be Maintainers, but still have significant MoveIt! experience.

    * recognized on the website, can put on CV, possibly could have Github tags for them so the community can recognize them.



## Clang-tidy:

  *  https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit/issues/28 describes the next steps in detail

  * Travis might time out: could look into Coverity (used to find issues like https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit/issues/1277) that might run these things on other sites besides Travis

 * need to be cautious around function name changes, maybe those go in at the same time as the other API changes (discussed at the beginning of meeting)

  * Developer Workshop in China is focusing on clang-tidy



## Misc

* Nathan is still working on smarter PR assignment, has found a repo that might help

* Discussion of https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit/pull/1294, https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit/pull/1272, and   https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit/pull/1288, attempting to merge them before the China Developer Workshop











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