ROS meeting, 17 June 2008

• moving to cmake
  • cmake is far better than I imagined
  • brian has wrapped it up as a ROS package
  • any scary issues (besides documenting how to use it) before we roll it out?
• shared packages in rospack
  • some 3rd-party packages (e.g. cmake, ffmpeg, opencv) take a long time to compile and eat up a fair amount of disk space
  • it would be nice to have a way to tell rospack that certain builds of certain packages are available on the network, so everybody doesn't have to have their own versions of it
  • kind of a big deal for us at Stanford (and almost surely at other universities), because user-account quota is scarce for undergrads, and you don't want to eat it all up with just your build of cmake or OpenCV)
  • proposal: a rospack "site definition file" that maps between rospack packages and where a pre-built version of one is, so long as some predicate is met (e.g. 32-bit machine, Fedora 6, on AFS).
  • questions:
    • any pre-existing tools could be used for this purpose?
    • if not, best way to implement? (as bash scripts in a rospack "plugins" directory, as an XML file in ROS_ROOT, etc.)