[Rock-dev] PCL version in Rock

[Martin Günther]

Hi Sylvain,

On Wed, 16 Mar 2016 12:46:49 -0300
Sylvain Joyeux <bir.sylvain at gmail.com> wrote:

> If we were to use the git, we probably would use the latest released
> PCL version, which would not really help with the "did not get
> updated" situation. It would indeed improve the "override-ability".
> But by having everyone "update" privately, Rock as a whole loses.

I'm not sure whether I got your point. Whether we use Git or Tarball is
orthogonal to the question if we should update to a newer PCL version,
right?

> Updates to external packages like this usually require someone to push
> for it, because if noone wants it, then noone will bother to check
> whether the new PCL version(s) have backward compatibility issues
> (thus breaking other people's code), and noone will bother push to get
> it updated.
> 
> Completely hypothetically: reasons why there has not been such a push
> might be that 1.7.1 -> 1.7.2 does not seem as huge as you are making
> it sound (at least according to
> https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl/releases). I.e. if you had
> code working on 1.7.1, 1.7.2 is not a major improvement to you. And
> that since Ubuntu 15.04, pcl is provided by binary packaged (which are
> packaging 1.7.2).
> 
> Ironically, the fact that 1.7.2 is mainly a bugfix release means that
> we could pretty easily update ... but that's up to the PCL users to
> push for that change (which you are doing right now, thanks !)

Completely agree. There are no killer features even in current
PCL master that 1.7.1 is lacking (for my use cases); on the other hand,
there have been 1000 commits between 1.7.1 and 1.7.2, and 800 more since
then. Most of them are bugfixes, but it would be nice to use them. I
regularly run into PCL bugs that have already been fixed since 1.7.1,
so I have to work around them to make my code run with 1.7.1.

I'm not sure how I would go about checking if a PCL update would break
*other people's* code. If everyone agrees the *next* version of Rock
should upgrade to PCL 1.7.2, we should probably announce that on
rock-users and implore everyone to test their code before that next
version is released, right? What's the usual process in Rock for this
sort of thing?

Best wishes,
Martin

-- 
Dipl.-Inf. Martin Günther
Researcher

DFKI GmbH
Robotics Innovation Center Bremen - Außenstelle Osnabrück
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