Robotics Systems Types

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

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.

IMPORTANT: This release is outdated and the versioning scheme used here has been replaced. Do not use this release!

We are happy to announce the release of version 1.0 of RST. This is the initial release. It provides

• Two sets of data types:
  • The types in source:branches/1.0/rst/proto/stable/ have matured over a few months, should be documented and are expected to not change much in the future
  • The types in source:branches/1.0/rst/proto/sandbox/ are experimental, partially undocumented and subject to change without warning
• A set of converters for common types in source:branches/1.0/converter-repository
• Work in progress: an initial manual draft in the directory source:branches/1.0/manual
  (The generated HTML version can be accessed via the documentation server)