Best way to organise ROS-based platform?
Hello!
Recently we developed some software for robotics competition using ROS. To efficiently reuse our existing code base in different future competitions, we decided to split our software on two parts: common platform that will provide interaction with hardware, API and tools, and the second parts are competition-specific repositories that will contain missions logic and will use described platform.
The problem is how to share common parts of the platform like message/services/actions definitions and API classes between platform itself and competition-specific projects. For now, I found three possible solutions:
1) Include the platform implementation as a git submodule in every competition-specific project. So hacky way, especially because we already use some git submodules of third-party projects.
2) Split the platform on two repositories: one for common part (messages, API classes) and the second is platform implementation itself
3) And maybe the cleanest way - build and install platform packages locally and make it be visible system-wide like they were installed via apt-get. But we haven't manage to do it yet.
Has anyone faced similar problem? Or anyone can share best practices? And are there any ways to realise the third described method?
This may be me (as it's clear you see one), but could you please clarify what the problem is? If you're using several packages already and they're setup somewhat sensibly, splitting common parts from application-specific parts should not be that much of an issue.
Are you particularly worried about deployment, setting up development environments or something else?