camera_info_manager/Reviews/2010-05-26_Doc_Review

Proposer: Jack O'Quin

Reviewers:

• Eric Perko
• Tully Foote
• Ken Tossell
• Bill Morris

Documents to be reviewed

camera_info_manager

CameraInfoManager class

The API review for this package in this release was held on 2010-05-20.

Instructions for doing a doc review

See DocReviewProcess for more instructions

1. Does the documentation define the Users of your Package, i.e. for the expected usages of your Stack, which APIs will users engage with?
2. Are all of these APIs documented?
3. Do relevant usages have associated tutorials? (you can ignore this if a Stack-level tutorial covers the relevant usage), and are the indexed in the right places?
4. If there are hardware dependencies of the Package, are these documented?
5. Is it clear to an outside user what the roadmap is for the Package?
6. Is it clear to an outside user what the stability is for the Package?
7. Are concepts introduced by the Package well illustrated?
8. Is the research related to the Package referenced properly? i.e. can users easily get to relevant papers?
9. Are any mathematical formulas in the Package not covered by papers properly documented?

Concerns / issues

(Eric) While the API is pretty straightforward, I think we should have a short tutorial showing basic usage - just enough to see how a driver might use a camera_info_manager. Perhaps just putting the camera_info_manager relevant source of camera1394 with more verbose explanations would be sufficient?

• (Tully) A tutorial would be great.

  (Ken) Agreed. A tutorial might provide (yet another) explanation of some basics of the image pipeline. That is, encourage API users to publish CameraInfos whenever they publish Images, using the same timestamps, mentioning TimeSynchronizers; explain any other concepts that apply to all Image publishers.

  (Jack) I don't want to repeat all the image pipeline docs here. For one thing, they would be hard to locate. But, the proposed tutorial should be cross-linked (both directions) with the image_transport publishing images tutorial.

(Tully) The API docs look good. Are there any issues with file permissions or access for reading or writing. These could be put on the troubleshooting page.

• (Jack) I agree that a troubleshooting page would be helpful. It should also mention tools for figuring out whether the service is being advertised with the correct name (rosservice, roswtf, etc.).

  (Jack) All file access is done via camera_calibration_parsers. If there are access permission problems the readCalibration() or writeCalibration() will return false. This result is passed to the caller of CameraInfoManager, but there is no detailed indication of what went wrong.

(Bill) To cut down on confusion, it may be helpful to explicitly note that it is a support class and not a separate node.

(Kurt) Are the formats (Videre .ini and yaml) documented anywhere?

• (Jack) Yes there is a pointer in the URL Names section to the camera_calibration_parsers format descriptions. That link needs to be more explicitly labelled.

Meeting agenda

The review meeting will be held on-line via IRC using #meeting.ros.org at freenode.net on 2010-05-26 at 3:00PM Central Time (1:00PM Pacific Time).

Conclusion

Actions agreed to during the meeting:

• Add Tutorial with examples of use.

• Add Troubleshooting page.

• Make file format link more explicit and descriptive.

• Add Overview section. Explain that there are no nodes or utility commands in this package.

• Make it clear that the caller of getCameraInfo() must fill in the CameraInfo message header time stamp.

This review is now complete.