[Rock-dev] buildconf-all / tools-lib_manager

[Sylvain Joyeux]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Janosch Machowinski
<Janosch.Machowinski at dfki.de> wrote:
> Actually you were still in Bremen, when we decided
> this.
I might have been in Bremen, now it does not mean that I was part of
the discussion. This is why these discussions should be *first* done
on the wiki + ML. Not everyone can be at a meeting (especially not any
non-DFKI person), and for decisions this important, *taking the time
to make the right decision* is critical. This impacts all of rock.
Libraries and framework alike. And if it turns out to be the wrong
decision, switching plugin systems is hell.

Moreover, if something has been discussed more than 6 months ago,
refreshing everyone about it before doing it would be a good idea -
especially if there are no written trace - because (1) we all remember
what we want to remember after 6 months and (2) things might have
changed since then.

I have always been against using anything home-grown, because having
our own in-house plugin system for something as big as rock is just
plain dumb. I also already offered that we should DEFINITELY try to
have a plugin system compatible with ROS'pluginlib. This is hopefully
written somewhere in the framework wiki.

https://github.com/ros/pluginlib/ is almost ros-independent. What's
basically missing is to replace the ROS console messages by
base/console_bridge (a change which could very well be accepted
upstream), get rid of catkin (might be accepted upstream) and have a
different way to find the XML description files than using
ros::package. This is battle-hardened code (having been used for the
last 6 ROS releases) and a *lot* more widespread than lib_manager.

Sylvain