roserr

PROPOSAL/RFC

roserr is the name of the error reporting mechanism in ROS. It can be thought as comprising several components:

• a roserr node for subscribing, logging, and displaying the stderr messages

• the global /roserr topic

• Log.msg type
• client APIs to facilitate easy use of the roserr reporting mechanism

Placeholder: [http://pr.willowgarage.com/pr-docs/ros-packages/roserr/html/index.html Auto-generated code documentation]

CHANGES

5/20/08: renamed to roserr, as Tully pointed out the confusion of saying "log it to stderr" 5/20/08: severity field added to .msg spec, along with our fancy new constants 5/20/08: StdErr.msg -> Log.msg. Slightly more general, so we don't need a separate type for other logging-style messages.

roserr node

NOTE: we are starting to collect a set of core nodes and should probably think about how we express their role in the system. They have a primacy with respect to startup order and bindings to client APIs.

These core nodes so far are:

• time node
• roserr node
• param server node

/roserr topic

All nodes connect to the roserr topic at startup time as publishers.

Log.msg

##
## Severity level constants
##
int FATAL=1  #fatal/critical level
int ERROR=10 #error level
int WARN=20  #warning level
int DEBUG=30 #debug level
int INFO=100 #general level
##
## Fields
##
int level
string name #name of node that failed (autoset)
string msg #error message 
string[] topics #topic names that the node publishes

Client API

The client APIs should hide the actual implementation details. The actual usage should be as simple as:

reportError(msg) reportWarning(msg) reportFatal(msg)

DebugService is another proposal for usage syntax and filtering semantics

CategoryPackage