Looking for meta-ros Maintainers

Dear all,

I am looking for users interested to act as meta-ros maintainer.

Within the last few months, various users have been contributing additions to the meta-ros layer and I would be happy to share the maintainer role with another person to have a second opinion on pull requests, and to take care when I am not immediately available.

If you have doubt that you are the right person to be a meta-ros maintainer, consider these questions:

  • Do you continuously use the master branch of meta-ros?
  • Does current project work foresees that you will using meta-ros for the next few months or next year?
  • Do you have a basic understanding of bitbake recipes and know how to write them?
  • Do you have some spare time for maintainer activities?

If you answer most of those questions with yes, please consider to volunteer as meta-ros maintainer. Note that the amount or size of your past contribution to meta-ros is not so important for being a maintainer.

The main (minimal) activity would be to review and test pull requests together with me, to answer questions on the OpenEmbedded discourse.ros.org topic, and to take care of the issue tracker (adding observed issues, removing duplicates, etc.). This minimal activity usually only takes roughly one hour per week.

Of course, as part of maintaining meta-ros, you can do more and ensure it works with the current master and the Yocto Project releases, help new users to get started with meta-ros, or get more involved in current improvements of the meta-ros layer.

If you are interested to help out, please post it here or send me an email and I can grant you full maintainer access to the current meta-ros repository.

Best regards,

Lukas

2 Likes

Hi,
I am a ROS Newbee but an advanced Openembedded/Yocto user. I plan to use meta-ros for my next project. I am not sure if this enough for an maintainer, but I am planning to fix some of the open issues on github. A while ago I added support for the ifm O3D3xx line of 3D ToF cameras to my private meta-ros fork.

Hi Christian,

currently, Dmitriy Rozhkov from Intel and me are actively maintaining the meta-ros
layer, but for sure, further helping hands for maintaining are welcome.

As advanced OpenEmbedded/Yocto user, I assume you know the difficulty of
maintaining an application layer while the upstream development in OpenEmbedded-Core
and the meta-oe layer move forward.
Certainly, I foresee that you, with your experience, can also provide some good input
to make catkin and meta-ros recipes build on the image, and support yocto’s SDK
feature.

To make sure that your maintenance work is also profitable for your goals,
I would propose to start with merging the O3D3xx recipes into the main-line meta-ros
repository. Just open a pull request and we will review and test your
proposed recipes.

You will find all open tasks in the github issue tracker. Feel free to comment on
topics that you would like to take over, either by doing or by instructing others,
that are already involved in the effort of the specific tasks.

Best regards,

Lukas

1 Like

Perfect, I’ll build a complete image and check if I can fix some of the open issues and warnings.

In the past I’ve concentrated on the latest release branch of Yocto. At work we do continues intergration, so this is maybe an option to keep track of the master branches.

Related to catkin, yes this is indeed a topic I am interested in. Providing the users to cross compile with the Yocto project or compiling on the target is a must have.

Related to the O3D3xx recipes, I was thinking to provide an extra layer, but some of the dependencies like PCL are not available in meta-oe at the moment. I’ll create a pull-request when back home.

Best,
Christian

I’m interested in porting Melodic to meta-ros. Do you have a tutorial on how to adapt the current indigo recipes to other versions?

Hi Lucas,

unfortunately we do not have a tutorial or extensive instructions on that yet, but I am happy to guide you through this. In fact, I was thinking about providing melodic myself, but I am currently still working on getting a new version on kinetic ready. So, it is good that you want to address melodic.

I suggest the following approach:

  1. checkout my “kinetic-experimental-v4-work-in-progress-v1” branch; that is a snapshot of the latest kinetic branch that I am still working on.

  2. update the ROSDISTRO and a few more places from kinetic to melodic.

  3. run update-recipes.py (with my preliminary script-improvement patches) to produce all recipe updates

  4. run bitbake core-image-ros-world and fix all build issues.

  5. clean-up all your commits

For 1., you can look at the commit:

You will simply need to update those places to melodic.

For 2., use the preliminary patches, which you can see at my branch “script-improvements-work-in-progress-v1”, to update-recipes.py, to obtain the bash commands to generate the recipe update commits.

For 3., expect many packages to fail, many are probably simple issues,but only a few are really difficult to address.

I recommended to start your work on top of my kinetic-experimental-v4-work-in-progress-v1 branch, as I already resolved all except for one build issues for kinetic.

It would be best if you can share your branch on your fork in github, then I can have a look, test and help you with the build issues you encounter.

If you need any further help, let me know.

Lukas

bulwahn,nice to meet you!
I am a ROS Newbee I plan to use meta-ros for my next project. I am not sure if this enough for an maintainer,And I also have more question. Should we fork a new issues about unmanned ship? thanks ,my email: guokunnpu#163.com.