Nice topic, and I agree with many of the points of the doc. I also understand the POV of @Katherine_Scott, and in my little experience it feels like ROS is a huge codebase continuously evolving. If it lacks manpower, it’s understandable to prioritize solving issues and introducing new features over maintaining an updated documentation (also considering that the same documentation may be outdated a few months later).
I agree with that too.
I started using ROS to create a pick and place application with a 6 axis cobot. Possibly one of the most basic industrial applications I can think of.
When I started with ROS (less than 6 months ago) I thought I could find an almost usable solution to my relatively “simple” problem, and deploy it quite quickly.
Instead, I found many different interesting “components” that I couldn’t figure how to configure or combine to obtain a functioning solution.
After a while, the only way to try and obtain something usable in a decent amount of time was to stick to the basics and build from that for my needs.
Even after building something that is more or less beginning to work (ManyMove), I’m not sure how much I can contribute to the documentation, as the reason I started writing a repo myself was that I couldn’t deeply understand how the available ones worked in a practical way.
As soon as I can finish up some basic features I want to create at least some tutorials. Then I’ll try and see if there is somewhere I can help with in ROS documentation.I understand very well the struggle in documenting the code, in ManyMove itself I tried to keep some useful comments updated and to build some documentation, but getting it to work comes obviously first.