ROS Hard Dependency now?

Hello,

Is ROS a hard dependency for building and using the Orocos Toolchain now?
I had been under the impression that it would work standalone, but it seems
that the build scripts are using ros build infrastructure.

Perhaps a better question is which pieces of the toolbox do I need just for:
* Building C++ components
* Deploying them using the standard deployer
* Sending plain-old-data structs over ports, in a way that is still
reportable/loggable

ROS's build system is so bad they're replacing it entirely in the next
version ("groovy"). I'm toying with the idea of just jettisoning ROS
entirely and implementing a very simple build system for our code that we
can actually maintain, and adding just the parts of orocos we need as git
submodules.

ROS Hard Dependency now?

2012/11/19 Andrew Wagner <drewm1980 [..] ...>

> Hello,
>
> Is ROS a hard dependency for building and using the Orocos Toolchain now?
> I had been under the impression that it would work standalone, but it
> seems that the build scripts are using ros build infrastructure.
>

Hi Andrew,

ROS is not at all a dependency for Orocos, and you should be able to use it
in a standalone way.

Maybe you have a ROS installation on your system, and then Orocos tries to
use ROS to build and install itself.
In that case, try to "unset ROS_ROOT" before doing a "cmake .." on the
Orocos folders!

Charles.

>
> Perhaps a better question is which pieces of the toolbox do I need just
> for:
> * Building C++ components
> * Deploying them using the standard deployer
> * Sending plain-old-data structs over ports, in a way that is still
> reportable/loggable
>
> ROS's build system is so bad they're replacing it entirely in the next
> version ("groovy"). I'm toying with the idea of just jettisoning ROS
> entirely and implementing a very simple build system for our code that we
> can actually maintain, and adding just the parts of orocos we need as git
> submodules.
>
> --
> Orocos-Users mailing list
> Orocos-Users [..] ...
> http://lists.mech.kuleuven.be/mailman/listinfo/orocos-users
>
>

ROS Hard Dependency now?

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Charles Lesire-Cabaniols
<charles [dot] lesire [..] ...> wrote:
>
>
> 2012/11/19 Andrew Wagner <drewm1980 [..] ...>
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Is ROS a hard dependency for building and using the Orocos Toolchain now?
>> I had been under the impression that it would work standalone, but it seems
>> that the build scripts are using ros build infrastructure.
>
>
> Hi Andrew,
>
> ROS is not at all a dependency for Orocos, and you should be able to use it
> in a standalone way.
>
> Maybe you have a ROS installation on your system, and then Orocos tries to
> use ROS to build and install itself.
> In that case, try to "unset ROS_ROOT" before doing a "cmake .." on the
> Orocos folders!

If you're reading the 2.5 release notes, you'll notice that 'ROS
build-style' will only be picked up if:

1. ROS_ROOT is set
2. the orocos toolchain is in your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH

Only then we use ros-style building, in all other cases, we stick to autoproj.

There were some issues/corner cases in this detection in 2.5.0, which
have been fixed on the toolchain-2.5 git branch later on. 2.6.0 (to be
released this week) is behaving really nicely on this matter.

Peter