Great, thanks for the cool work.
In the original porting status docs ( https://github.com/ms-iot/ROSOnWindows/blob/master/Porting/PortingStatus.md#september-2018 ) you wrote that work on porting Gazebo would start after the port of MoveIt! was completed. Given that MoveIt! is now available in ROS1 for Windows, are you still planning to tackle the port of the existing version of Gazebo to Windows next?
Regarding that, in the past I worked in adding the Gazebo dependencies to vcpkg ( see https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/issues/2129/visual-studio-2015-compatibility ). vcpkg is quite an interesting project, but the fact that it does not support binary installation limits its usefulness in several contexts. I happily noticed that instead for the the “system” dependencies of ROS1 (the one usually handled by rosdep) you set up a NuGet/Chocolatey repository of C++ libraries at https://roswin.azurewebsites.net/packages . I have two question on this:
- Are you planning to make the infrastructure used to setup this NuGet repo public and/or are you planning to accept community contribution for new non-ROS libraries for that repo? A well maintained NuGet repository of Windows binaries of C++ libraries useful for robotics software would be extremely helpful also for non-ROS projects, see for example https://github.com/dartsim/dart/issues/260 or https://github.com/robotology-playground/vcpkg-cpack/issues/2 .
- At the moment, for non-ROS dependencies it seems to me thay you are only distributing static libraries compiled with RelWithDebInfo flags. As AFAIK in Visual Studio for libraries with C++ API that uses certain STL containers the ABI between Release and Debug builds is different (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11658915/mixing-debug-and-release-library-binary-bad-practice), does this means that it is currently not possible to build ROS packages from source using the Debug configuration?
Again, thanks a lot for your amazing work.