Hide topics for "internal use" in nodelet pipeline from external subscribers?
I am considering to set up nodelet-based processing pipeline for pointclouds, including the nodelet-based filters described here http://wiki.ros.org/pcl_ros/Tutorials...
In order to record log data, we basically record everything currently (i.e., rosbag record -a).
I fear this approach will cause an (avoidable) performance overhead, as every intermediate filtering step (e.g., passthrough filtering z, then box filtering A, box filtering B, then merging the results and publishing derived information) is published and recorded externally, adding up serialization and deserialization of intermediate pointclouds, while we are actually only interested in logging the overall result of the pipeline.
Should we move towards a whitelist-based approach to log recording? Or is there a way to declare certain topics in a nodelet manager "for internal use only" and hide them from external subscribers (like rosbag record -a)?
