Foxy Message API Review

Next Generation ROS
2

This is great news!

The form allows feedback only at the single message level, so I’m posting some suggestions that don’t fit in that category here:

  • remove actionlib_msgs completely as it is a duplicate of action_msgs, this allows not to have to iterate on its API

  • std_msgs: Often in ROS 1 we see recommendations to “not use std_msgs directly but semantically meaningful messages instead”.
    It would be good to treat differently the ones that are expected to be used (e.g. Header) from the ones that “should not be used”
    Suggestions:

    1. take out the non-semantically meaningful messages out of std_msgs to e.g example_interfaces, and put them in another package (or remove them completely)
    2. Move the widely used ones (e.g. Header) to their own package to avoid building and installing the non-semantically meaningful ones
      It would both allow to save build time + install size as well as encouraging users to not use those in their custom messages

    Some relevant past discussion Suggestions for std_srvs

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