New version of meta-ros for kinetic distribution

Dear all,

Besides the more commonly tested and maintained (one could say officially supported) master branch of meta-ros for the ROS indigo distribution on https://github.com/bmwcarit/meta-ros, I keep an experimental local branch for the kinetic distribution. I have rebased it to the current master, updated and adjusted the recipes to get most recipes working again.

It is now published on my local github repository at:

https://github.com/bulwahn/meta-ros/tree/kinetic-experimental-v3-alpha1

I have tested to build it, and currently, most packages build without issues. The packages that fail on kinetic are tracked in the meta-ros issue tracker.

Feel free to use it if you like to work with the kinetic distribution.

However, please remember that this is an experimental local branch:
First, do not expect that this branch has been tested with many different build configurations, so possibly, your build configuration could cause build failure we are unaware of. Second, this branch is work in progress, and hence, the commits of this branch will be rebased and modified, and the git history will change in a non-monotonic way in the future.
Nevertheless, go ahead and try this branch and report issues if you encounter them.

I already plan to merge this kinetic branch (or a branch that has evolved from this one) into the main repository, and maintain two branches for indigo and kinetic. Before I do this, there are still a few open topics that I would like to have working on in the current master branch of meta-ros before we split the meta-ros repository is two branches.

Best regards,

Lukas

2 Likes

Great stuff @bulwahn, i just posted quickly about ROS 2 Layer for OpenEmbedded Linux. Let me know if you’re interested in contributing or have feedback about it.

Cheers,

Hi!

I am planning to set up a system with yocto and ros kinetic. I will probably need to add some recipes, (i.e. socketcan_interface), which I would like to share, if they meet quality requirements and are welcome. Is https://github.com/bulwahn/meta-ros/tree/kinetic-experimental-v3-alpha1 the right starting point? Or will there be a merge back to the bmwcarit repo in the near future?! Any other hints?!

Thanks,

Matthias

Hi Matthias,

Yes, you can go ahead and open pull requests (as I believe you already did); I will review, test and merge them there. As I was kind of indicatingin my first mail, I am maintaining the kinetic branch in parallel until more of less these two issues are solved:

  1. all the build issues that are still open with the kinetic branch are resolved. That is #498 & #499 on https://github.com/bmwcarit/meta-ros/issues. It might just be an hour of work looking at those recipes, but I tried to resolve it in ten minutes and then gave up and deferred it to a point where I would more time or more users asking for it.

  2. the pull request #519 to meta-ros is fully tested with the different supported scenarios, we have scripts in place that can test the features that #519 provides continuously in our CI. We then can finally merge it in the master branch.

I think once we have got those two open issues solved, we can actually split the current development in two branches, an indigo branch and a kinetic branch, and maintain both of them.

Both issues are not really difficult (at least I believe so), but they might require a week of work on that and so far no one has stepped up to do that and I am unfortunately too busy to find a week of time to do focussed work on meta-ros.

In the past, I was also concerned about the maintenance effort of two branches, as we did not have a CI in place, Fortunately, @rojkov has built a great CI solution for meta-ros and now testing pull requests to the branches is much easier and fully automatic. So, this issue I was concerned about is already solved and we can actually maintain two branches with reasonable effort now.

Best regards,

Lukas