API review

Proposer: Josh F

Present at review:

• Jack O'Quin

Question / concerns / comments

Enter your thoughts on the API and any questions / concerns you have here. Please sign your name. Anything you want to address in the API review should be marked down here before the start of the meeting.

• Stu:

  • The Subscriber and Publisher have radically different APIs. subscribe vs initialize to connect, the publisher requires creating a ros::Publisher and the Subscriber is initialized straight from the NodeHandle.

  • Is it okay to call ros::rt::init() multiple times?

    • [Josh] Yes

• Jack would it be possible to provide a callback version of subscribe? That could make it more straightforward to convert regular ROS nodes to RT nodes. I'm just imagining polling each subscribed topic in the (presumably real-time) main thread when it calls spinOnce().

  • [Josh] I don't know that this is actually that useful... the requirements of realtime mean this is likely the least of your problems if you're converting a node over. You'd end up having to "poll" each subscriber, calling the callback if necessary instead of returning the message, which doesn't seem like a big win to me. If you can come up with a need for it I can look into it but definitely not for the initial release.

• Josh should this move from the ros::rt namespace into the rosrt namespace?

Meeting agenda

To be filled out by proposer based on comments gathered during API review period

Conclusion

Package status change mark change manifest)

• Action items that need to be taken.

• Major issues that need to be resolved

* /!\ Change ros::rt
to rosrt::

• Make publisher always copy messages from pool

• Add simple constructor to Publisher that's the "common" form of advertise()

• Add optional rosrt::shutdown()