Robotics Systems Types

To further increase the stability of data type and converter definitions inside RST, we have revised the process of how changes like new data types or changes in converter code can be incorporated into the project. Backwards compatibility is a very crucial part of RST as the data types are a dependency of many components. In the past, basically everyone who wanted had access to the main RST repositories. However, from time to time commits broke the compatibility rules and complaints were received. This is especially a problem with GIT, as we sometimes were unable to trace back who performed which commit (this is caused by the fact that authentication for writing to the repository is separated from the committer field inside each commit).

As a consequence we now have limited write access to the repositories to only a few core developers of RST. To incorporate changes we will now start to use a process comparable to pull requests, e.g. at github. GIT allows to develop new types or required modifications first in a private and local branch. Once the modifications have been initially tested, you should open an issue in the redmine to incorporate these changes. Before incorporating the changes, the core developers will perform a review in order to enforce the stability of the project.

The new process is described in detail in the manual at:
http://docs.cor-lab.de/rst-manual/trunk/html/developer-tutorial.html#adding-new-data-types