Welcome to your annual, “someone new to ROS dislikes the build system and would like the community to change it for them post.” Past examples include: Migrating ROS/ROS2 off of catkin/colcon (towards pure CMake) - #40 by actinium226 and ROS only simpler
@doganulus, I am a moderator for ROS Discourse. About once a year we have someone new to the community complain that they don’t understand / like our build tooling (Catkin, Colcon, or Ament) and that we should change them to some other sort of build tool.
It would be helpful for you to recognize a few things.
- Our tools were often built prior to the existence of viable replacements. The ROS project is well over a decade old. This history has inertia and makes it difficult to change things quickly.
- Our goal is to build tools that help those who may not be CS experts (e.g. electrical / mechanical engineers) have a solid foundation in robotics as well as supporting the power users. The standardization that ament provides avoids a lot of boilerplate code and simplifies the development for larger systems.
- ROS is a big project, like a tanker ship, you can’t just turn the whole thing around on a dime.
- When we do turn things around it requires the effort of a huge community to both build and test the changes and to roll them out to a giant community of downstream users who may not care about your particular issue.
- Simply driving by and suggesting that we should change something for you simply because you don’t like our “level of abstraction” is not exactly a way to win friends and influence people.
- We have our ways of changing the project. I am sorry you don’t like those either, but that’s how things get done in a community of this size.
I have already had multiple users claim you are being inflammatory and moreover, this seems to be a pattern of behavior. If you want to take a breath, propose a viable alternative to ament, gather sufficient resources to make that alternative happen, and follow our processes for changing ROS, by all means, make the proposal. Otherwise you are simply being inflammatory and angering a lot of your very busy colleagues. If that’s the case I am inclined to lock the thread.