Georg Bartels's profile - activity

I encounter the same behavior as described in the original question in May 2022 on ROS2 Galactic. Has this issue been fi

I have the same question and am not sure whether the project linked in the accepted answer actually addresses this. Henc

Hi BrettRD, thanks for starting and sharing such an ambitious project! My use-case is closer to the original audio_commo

Hi guys,

I'm porting a package from ROS1 to ROS2 that builds and exposes a 3rd-party project to the ROS world. That external library uses automake and autoconf, and I do not want to change that to stay compatible with upstream provider of the lib. In the past, I used the cmake macro ExternalProject_Add to do this. Now, I am having trouble porting this functionality to ament_cmake.

My initial questions are: 1) What is the preferred way to build, install, and export 3rd-party non-cmake source projects for ament_cmake? 2) Has anybody successfully compiled, installed, and exported such an library using ExternalProject_Add?

I will refine my questions, once the issue has become clearer. ;)

For reference, this is the catkin CMakeLists that I want to port to ROS2: CMakeLists

After some months, I am revisiting this question, and I found a solution. For completeness sake, I post my solution here

After some months, I am revisiting this question, and I found a solution to my question from last September. For complet

Hi all,

I just went over the tutorials for pre-release tests on the website:

http://wiki.ros.org/bloom/Tutorials/PrereleaseTest

It refers to the possibility of running pre-release tests on the buildfarm, i.e. non-locally. However, the link pointing to the buildfarm's pre-release page is broken:

"Then go to buildfarm's pre-release web site: wiki.ros.org/prerelease.ros.org "

Is this feature deprecated? If yes, oh no! Is this feature not available, yet? If yes, I can't wait. If the feature is around, where can I find the page of the buildfarm's pre-release site? A quick google search did not help me... Thanks already.

Cheers, Georg.

It's been a long time, and this question went without much activity. By now, a lot of people use coveralls, and there ar

That would be great! I'll make sure to watch that issue. :)

@gvdhoorn Thank you for the fast response and the link to yamlccp. That looks great! I will provide a more detailed desc

Thank you for the answer! From the accepted answer it was not 100% clear to me whether this verb was in the development

How to include external automake/autoconf projects into ament_cmake? Hi guys, I'm porting a package from ROS1 to ROS2 t

Any news on this feature? I couldn't find it as a verb of the ros2 command.

To help you, could you please provide a bit more information such that the problem can be reproduced? 1) Which ROS ver

I encountered the same problem. This seems to be a known and fixed bug. It seems to come from a Java API changes between

There are python bindings for the Bullet Physics engine, called PyBullet. PyBullet comes with various collision checking

Indeed, Felix' comment was very helpful. I was also looking for the name of that package. Thanks!

Does the robot_state_publisher support sensor_msgs/MultiDOFJointState messages? Hi, I found the message definition sens

I have a github repository with a catkin package inside which only holds C++ code. I have already set it up for travis-ci, and now want to further configure it for coveralls.io to analyse the coverage of my tests. How do I do that?

I have already read through coverall.io's examples here, and tried to find other ROS repos which use Coveralls.io. Unfortunately, none of those approaches helped me.

Any help is welcome!

P.S.: I use ROS Indigo, Ubuntu 14.04.

gvdhoorn's answer pointed me into the right direction. I provide my own solution for documentation.

Here is the CMakeLists of igh_eml which checks out and builds the external mercurial repository:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.3)
project(igh_eml)

find_package(catkin REQUIRED)

include(ExternalProject)
ExternalProject_Add(upstream_igh_eml
  HG_REPOSITORY http://hg.code.sf.net/p/etherlabmaster/code
  HG_TAG 792892ab4806
  TIMEOUT 30
  UPDATE_COMMAND touch <SOURCE_DIR>/config.h COMMAND mkdir -p <SOURCE_DIR>/include <SOURCE_DIR>/lib
  CONFIGURE_COMMAND touch <SOURCE_DIR>/ChangeLog COMMAND autoreconf -i <SOURCE_DIR> COMMAND <SOURCE_DIR>/configure --prefix=<INSTALL_DIR> --disable-kernel --enable-hrtimer --enable-tool
  BUILD_IN_SOURCE 1
  INSTALL_DIR ${CATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX}
)

add_library(ethercat SHARED IMPORTED)
set_target_properties(ethercat PROPERTIES IMPORTED_LOCATION ${CATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX}/lib/libethercat.so)
add_dependencies(ethercat upstream_igh_eml)

catkin_package(
    LIBRARIES ethercat
)

Important notes: (1) catkin_package has to be called AFTER the build and import calls. (2) Exporting the include files at ${CATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX}/include with catkin_package was not possible, that directory does not exist when catkin_package is interpreted.

The depending package omnidrive_ethercat has the following CMakeLIsts:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.3)
project(omni_ethercat)

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS ... igh_eml ...)

catkin_package(
  CATKIN_DEPENDS ... igh_eml ...)

include_directories(include ${catkin_INCLUDE_DIRS})

add_executable(omni_ethercat src/omni_ethercat.cpp src/omnilib/omnilib.c src/omnilib/realtime.c)
target_link_libraries(omni_ethercat ${catkin_LIBRARIES})
add_dependencies(omni_ethercat upstream_igh_eml)

Important note: I have to directly depend on the build target upstream_igh_eml to halt compilation until all the h-files and so-files in igh_eml have been downloaded and built. The target ethercat was not enough. Also, I did not find out how to export this target through a CMake variable.

So, this a working solution, but there is room for improvement...

Thank you for your answer! It pointed me into the right direction.

Hi,

I encountered difficulties wrapping an external driver into a catkin package such that other catkin packages can depend on it. The driver is provided by a company as open-source, it builds without cmake, and it is distributed through a public mercurial repository.

To conveniently pull in upstream updates, I wanted to have the build process checkout and build a specific commit. I know this is discouraged behavior for releasing ROS packages through the build-farm. But for the moment I do not intend to release the package through the build-farm.

I tried using the CMake command ExternalProject_Add because of the following question: http://answers.ros.org/question/63259...

Building the driver library works fine, but any depending catkin package is not aware of the build target for the library. Does anybody know how to properly expose the library and the build target itself to other catkin packages?

Here are the details. In my package igh_eml I successfully build a library called ethercat. igh_eml's CMakeLists.txt looks like this:

project(igh_eml)

find_package(catkin REQUIRED)

catkin_package(
  INCLUDE_DIRS ${CATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX}/include
  LIBRARIES ethercat)

include(ExternalProject)
ExternalProject_Add(upstream_igh_eml
# #--Download step----------
  HG_REPOSITORY http://hg.code.sf.net/p/etherlabmaster/code         # URL of mercurial repo
  HG_TAG 792892ab4806                # Mercurial branch name, commit id or tag
  TIMEOUT 30           # Time allowed for file download operations
  # #--Update/Patch step----------
  UPDATE_COMMAND touch <SOURCE_DIR>/config.h COMMAND mkdir -p <SOURCE_DIR>/include <SOURCE_DIR>/lib    # Source work-tree update command
  # #--Configure step-------------
  CONFIGURE_COMMAND touch <SOURCE_DIR>/ChangeLog COMMAND autoreconf -i <SOURCE_DIR> COMMAND <SOURCE_DIR>/configure --prefix=<INSTALL_DIR> --disable-kernel --enable-hrtimer --enable-tool  # Build tree configuration command
  # #--Build step-----------------
  BUILD_IN_SOURCE 1         # Use source dir for build dir
)

ExternalProject_Get_Property(upstream_igh_eml source_dir)

add_custom_command(TARGET upstream_igh_eml POST_BUILD
    COMMAND cp 
      ${source_dir}/../../include/ecrt.h 
      ${CATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX}/include/
)

add_custom_command(TARGET upstream_igh_eml POST_BUILD
     COMMAND cp 
     ${source_dir}/../../include/ectty.h
     ${CATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX}/include
)

add_custom_command(TARGET upstream_igh_eml POST_BUILD
    COMMAND cp 
    ${source_dir}/../../lib/libethercat.so
    ${CATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX}/lib
 )

Here is a link to the actual file: https://github.com/code-iai/iai_robot...

My second package omnidriver_ethercat depends on igh_eml on gives this error:

CMake Error at /home/georg/ros/indigo/boxy_refactoring/devel/share/igh_eml/cmake/igh_emlConfig.cmake:141 (message):
  Project 'omni_ethercat' tried to find library 'ethercat'.  The library is
  neither a target nor built/installed properly.  Did you compile project
  'igh_eml'? Did you find_package() it before the subdirectory containing its
  code is included?

Here is a link to CMakeLists of omnidrive_ethercat : https://github.com/code-iai/iai_robot...

Does anybody know how I declare that the library ethercat will be build through ExternalProject_Add? Furthermore, how can I make other catkin packages wait for that build target to finish? Thanks in advance for any help!

Thanks for your suggestion. I also think this is not possible. So, I'm closing this question. :)