Introduction of Persistent Systems to ROS2 initiative

[gavanderhoorn]

@gbiggs

Just plain making a package work in ROS2 is useful, but you should do more than just port. You should take advantage of as much of the new capabilities allowed by ROS2 as possible. This means things like restructuring the design of nodes to be composable, taking advantage of QoS and deciding the best default QoS for each topic, using local parameters, and using read only parameters where it makes sense (when they become available). Once code is available working in ROS2 I think it is less likely that such restructuring will be done, so doing it as part of the porting process is valuable.

Yes, this.

This is so important, it cannot be stated often enough.

As nice as plain ports are, they will never be what the pkgs could be if they were only conceptually ported instead of s|#include <ros/ros.h>|#include <ros2/ros2.h>|g (I know that doesn’t work that way … if only), and when there is a plain port, there will be much less of an incentive to do anything about the ported pkg as it’s there and it works … well enough.