Uuid-msgs porting to ROS2

Anyone working on porting uuid-msgs to ROS2? If not, our team at Persistent System is ready to put the effort in porting uuid-msgs to ROS2. Please let us know if anyone has any concern or any vital information that we will help us in this porting effort. If anyone has already started already working on porting uuid-msgs, Please let us know if you will be interested to obtain our assistance in the porting effort.
@joq , I see that you are the maintainer of this package in ROS, hence I’m tagging you here in this post.

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As none has responded, I’m assuming none is working on porting this package to ROS2 at this time. If so, Our team at Persistent will work on porting this package very soon.

@jacob did you ever decide if you wanted to use this in actions?

Thanks @prasentijdan for your interest in porting packages to ROS2!

Similar to Geographic-msgs porting to ROS2, this package and the others in the unique_identifier repo seem to already have a partial ros2 ports on the ros2 branch, as well as PRs for full port awaiting review and merge: https://github.com/ros-geographic-info/unique_identifier/pulls.

In order to reduce the noise on discourse I would like to encourage you to browse existing PRs and issues for ROS2 ports and communicate there in priority.

Thanks!

The plan is to use UUIDs as goal IDs in ROS2 actions. As a stopgap, we might implement (or find) some tools for working with UUIDs in C (since the core logic for actions will be in rcl). But, ultimately we’d like to port uuid_msgs as a core repo along with separate language specific libraries for working with UUIDs (ticket pending; last checkbox in actions meta-ticket)

For example, we might create a repo, unique_identifier, with the following packages:

  • unique_identifier_c
  • unique_identifier_cpp
  • unique_identifier_python
  • unique_identifier_msgs

Where the first three packages are ROS-agnostic libraries for working with UUIDs, and the last is essentially what uuid_msgs is now.

If we go forward with making uuid_msgs a core repo, it looks like we can fork from https://github.com/stonier/unique_identifier/tree/ros2.
@stonier (and others), what are your thoughts on replacing the unique_id package with language specific packages instead?

I’m in favour of this. Many languages (Python comes to mind as an example) have packages for working with UUIDs as part of their core libraries. Being able to leverage these where possible would reduce maintenance burden for the ROS libraries.

@jacob, Thank you for your reply. Do you have any specific timeline in mind for stopgap as well as target separate language specific libraries?

I expect the stopgap implementation will happen by end of next week (since we need this for the rcl implementation). I don’t think the separate language specific libraries are as crucial, but hopefully they could be in for Crystal release (by end of December).

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