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  • IRC: irc.oftc.net:6667, #ros

  • Mailing list

Work Areas

Current development is for groovy. The main areas of development which could use work include:

• Stack porting - main targets are nodelets, tf, rqt, openni (mingw and msvc).

• Msvc Build Environment - specific build tools, packaging rosdeps, testing different compilers.

• Msvc Runtime Environment - functionality for runtime tools (rostopic, rosbag etc) and fixing comms issues.

• Msvc Installers - packaging dependencies and the sdk itself, one by one its a pain.

• Mingw Environment - getting things working with the mingw cross compiler

And anything else you can think of that would make your life easier. Some specific comments follow.

Details

Stack Porting

• How to Patch Existing Stacks

This guide is written for patching existing stacks. It is what we have been using so far to patch the ros stacks in the sdk and is the best way to get your work noticed and committed upstream by the core ros developers. Other items that tend to crop up fairly frequently are usually platform specific to either mingw or msvc.

• Msvc

  • Posix to Win32 - notes on posix to win32api porting.

  • Handling Dll Exports - handling msvc library import/export declspecs (we don't usually care about this in linux).

  • Packaging Rosdeps - how to package 3rd party dependencies.

• Mingw

  • Mingw Cross - using mingw_cross, the cross-compiler on linux.

  • Posix to Mingw Posix - notes on posix to mingw posix porting.

  • Packaging Rosdeps - how to package 3rd party dependencies inside mingw_cross.

Msvc Build Environment

We're currently using windows sdk 7.1 and nmake for development. Using express or visual studio would require alot of extreme hacking in cmake and python (catkin). If someone has an itch, it can be done - we've experimentally had it working before, but it is not a priority as it doesn't provide any real advantage over nmake (note that this has nothing to do with building visual studio projects on top of the sdk - we're only talking about building the sdk here).

Msvc Runtime Enviroment

Currently on the agenda are a couple of things:

• Roslaunch works but has a couple of problems in corner cases
• No rosrun yet
• Windows python seems to be very slow.

Msvc Installers

Currently don't really have a solution! We have a few build scripts that create msi's or zips for ros dependencies or the sdk in win_ros, but nothing that tracks and installs dependencies like ubuntu's apt-get. Its a real shortcoming.

• Bundle rosdeps and sdk in one big installer?

• Upgrade something like App Updater

• Can we use windows 8 market?

Mingw Environment

We have disabled it for now, since we aren't using it currently. But it would take little effort with the new catkin to re-enable it. If you have an itch, scratch it.