We depend on 'rapidjson', so maybe adding it?..it's complicated..
Greetings ROS-safarians. We've developed a ROS driver to read from and control the OmniPreSense radar sensor, which does much of its communications as a JSON message. We chose rapidjson as our library for encoding and decoding JSON payloads.
One of the benefits of rapidjson is that it appeared to be in ros already. (It is listed in https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob... as rapidjson-dev) Alas, it's not that easy :(
So, the rapidjson-dev package in Ubuntu 16.04 is archaic (0.12) and our driver made use of some more contemporary calls. We thought we might just add the rapidjson repo to ros ( https://github.com/Tencent/rapidjson.git ) and get back to using the modern API.
However, we just found that Ubuntu 18.04 and it's predecessor 17.10 updated to the modern rapidjson API (1.1.0). (And I think there might now be a deb package named 'rapidjson' , though 'apt-get install rapidjson' does NOT work in 16.04--perhaps it does in 18.04?)
So, ultimately the question is how do we add (to ROS, as a library we can declare we are dependent on) a modern rapidjson which can be available consistently in Ubuntu 16.04 (xenial) and Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic beaver). (We need 16.04LTS for ROS-for-raspberry-pi) It seems like we certainly cannot just rely on the deb package "rapidjson-dev" even though in Ubuntu 18.04 it would have been just fine.
Should we create a ROS package and let the build farm build it? It seems like it. I expect we should not call our clone "rapidsjon-dev" (because that's available by apt install rapidjson-dev) However, since there is a "rapidjson" deb archive, then that name is also not a good choice. Is it a good idea or bad idea to add it under the name "rapidjson-ros"?
Any advice is welcome. Sorry if this is a newbie question--I'm relatively new to ROS. Thanks.