I’m pleased to announce that the ROS 2 Rust Working Group is getting back into doing regular meetings! These will be held on the second Monday of every month, at 15:00 CEST time. You can see the schedule on the Open Source Robotics Foundation Community Events calendar.
We apologize, but we are having techincal difficulties with the room. As such, we have moved the room to https://meet.google.com/gmc-wodv-tqz for today.
Very sorry about that! Future meeting notices will have that feature!
A brief rundown on what was discussed:
Introduction to who the team leads are
Current state of the client library
Missing a few features before we are comfortable saying that everything can be written in Rust:
Actions
Parameters
Lifecycle Nodes
Timers
Logging integration with ROS 2
A reiteration that any and all contributions are welcome to the project!
Use cases are especially useful for us to know - at the moment we pick and choose what to work on by guesswork: “I think people are going to need XYZ at the moment”. If we get community feedback about features that are needed/wanted, and what sort of problems they are trying to solve, that helps guide us in what to tackle first.
The community is more than welcome to open issues about this. Additionally, if anyone sees any opportunities to improve the client library, feel free to open up a pull request!
The more people that we have working together on this, the faster the client library can get to a 100% usable state!
The next meeting will be on: 2023-05-08T13:00:00Z
Our current plan is to continue holding these meetings on the second Monday of every month. And everyone is welcome! Whether you are a Rust/ROS 2 expert or a beginner in both, we would love to see you!
Additionally, we have a room on Element/Matrix chat that people are welcome to join / chat on. That’s a good spot to hop on and say hello - I’ll try to respond when I see someone asking questions as soon as I can!
I did not see any meeting notes for June’s meeting. Was that one canceled as well like the May 8 meeting?
Will the meeting on the OSRF Community Calendar at 2023-07-10T13:00:00Z happen as planned? The OSRF Infrastructure Project Committee is resuming our work on setting up the infrastructure for Rust in ROS 2 and I’d like to share what we’re planning to support with the current working group and pick up the discussion threads and collaboration where we left off.
@nuclearsandwich presented work he and colleges are doing to support Rust as a language for publishing packages to the official ROS buildfarm. My summary is that the plan is to use the same tooling and process being used by Debian for packaging Rust projects. There are some open questions about how Rust dependencies are fetched and specified (Cargo.toml and/or package.xml). Different approaches have tradeoffs that affect how well Rust fits with the existing workflow for ROS packages and the ergonomics of Rust ROS projects compared to non-ROS Rust projects. Rust library packages also have the idea of features that can complicate this. There is a desire to reduce the amount of information that has to be duplicated manually between the Cargo.toml and package.xml and how they might interact.