Open Source Collaboration Platform

Version 0.9 of Robotics Systems Commons has been released.

• Implementation of a simple plugin mechanism (#127)
• Windows compatibility fixes
• Logger names are now case-insensitive (#1336)
• CMake versioning macros have been adapted so that the patch version is only increased on release branches (#1256)

The full list of addressed issues is available here.

The release can be obtained from the "0.9" branch of the git repository.

As there was some confusion about the releases and versions of RST and the news section here still missed a proper announcement, this news entry tries to summarize the changes during the last months.

Originally, RST started with explicitly no project versioning. This however, turned out to be hard to maintain and people requested versions to depend on. Therefore, we released version 1.0 as a first version just to have something people could depend on. This was once repeated with version 1.1 but still with the official policy that no versions exist. The rationale behind these decisions can still be found on this wiki page.

However, due to the predominant use of RST along with Robotics Service Bus and its existing versioning scheme, we finally decided that it would be beneficial to officially support versions of RST in line with the usual RSB/RSC versioning scheme. This creates a coherent picture of the RSx tools and shields client applications more successfully against changes to data types, as they can now officially depend on a stable version with policies of how changes are made to these released versions.

Unfortunately, RSB was at that point in time and still is way below a 1.1 release. Hence, the 1.0 and 1.1 versions of RST had to be declared as invalid afterwards.

• Do not use versions 1.0 and 1.1 of RST
• Use the current stable version 0.7

Summary¶

For the master branch of Robotics Systems Types, we changed the preferred comment format and added a syntax for unit specifications.

Data types which are added to the master should obey these new conventions.

The 0.7 branch is not affected.

Comment Style¶

With respect to formatting of comments, we made the following changes:

• comments should be formatted like this
  

  /**
   * CONTENT
   */
    

• fields should be documented individually
• @author, @todo etc. should be used.

In summary:

/**
 * ONE-SENTENCE-DESCRIPTION.
 *
 * MORE-DETAILS
 *
 * @author NAME <EMAIL>
 */

Units¶

We added the following syntax for field-level unit specifications

/**
 * COMMENT-DESCRIBING-FIELD
 */
// @unit(UNIT-NAME)
required TYPE NAME = NUMBER;

The initial // preserves compatibility to protoc but may be omitted eventually.

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

rsb-gstreamer has switched to a GIT repository available as https://code.cor-lab.org/git/rsb-gstreamer.git. The old SVN is still available as read-only repository.

We have fixed some issues in the C++ implementation of the RSB socket transport, which may have caused inconsistencies or crashes. Therefore it is advisable to get the most recent version of 0.7 or the master branch. Please note that bug fixes were also made in RSC. Hence, RSC should also be upgraded.

The existing lose collection of converters has been restructured. The following changes were made:

• Converters are now versioned along with RSB starting with 0.6.
• Converters now have a build system which creates (for the moment) a single shared library of all converters that could be built on the respective platform (depending on satisfied dependencies).
• The build system finally allows to add unit tests for converters

Information on how to use the new structure can be found in the manual: http://docs.cor-lab.de/rst-manual/trunk/html/converters.html

We replaced the Robotics Systems Types Subversion repostiory with multiple git repositories, approximately one for each subproject. Subproject URL are constructed according to following scheme:

https://code.cor-lab.org/git/rst.git.SUBPROJECT

We kept the Subversion repository under the same URL. However, this repository is now read-only.

All repostories can be browsed in the "Repository" tab of the project.

We replaced the RSB XML Support Subversion repostiory with multiple git repositories, approximately one for each subproject. Subproject URL are constructed according to following scheme:

https://code.cor-lab.org/git/rsb-xml.git.SUBPROJECT

We kept the Subversion repository under the same URL. However, this repository should be considered (and will be) read-only.

All repostories can be browsed in the "Repository" tab of the project.

We are happy to announce the release of version 0.7 of RSB. The development activities in this cycle focused on

• Migration to git
• TCP socket transport introduced and default
• Error recovery, robustness and features of RSB and RSBag tools
• End-user documentation
• Packaging and deployment

In the process, about 70 issues have been created and subsequently resolved.

• Source archives
• Pre-compiled self-installing archives or executable binaries
• Debian packages for different Ubuntu Linux versions
• Prototypical homebrew recipes and pypi packages

Installation instructions and links for downloading can be found on the preparation pages of the RSB manual and the RSBag manual.

As always, bugs, feature requests and enhancement proposals can be reported in the respective issue trackers:
RSB,
RSBag.

1. Only TCP socket transport is now enabled by default.

   For transport configuration issues see troubleshooting.

2. Log files recorded with the 0.7 version of RSBag cannot be processed with older RSBag versions. The opposite direction works, though.

For a more detailed list of fixed bugs, added features and other enhancements, see https://code.cor-lab.org/versions/22.