Is it possible to use Fuerte packages in Hydro?

Question

I need some knowledge and clarification from people who know ROS better than I do.

I've been trying to use camera_pose_calibration with no success. I've tried a lot of different things including overlaying a fork which is commonly cited to help fix problems. Still, nothing.

So after wrestling with the same problem for a while I decided to go look at the Fuerte --> Groovy migration page to get some clues. In it, it says that catkin packages (Groovy and later) cannot depend on rosbuild based packages. Right now our lab computer has Fuerte, Groovy, and Hydro installed with one other student and I switching between Groovy and Hydro when we need to. We switch the sourcing in the .bashrc and then continue on our way.

However, there is a guide to switching from rosbuild to catkin. If I'm understanding this correctly, then there should be a way to take a Fuerte package and make it usable in Hydro. However, my question would be a) is there a program to automate this and b) assuming I have to do it myself, how difficult would it be?

http://wiki.ros.org/groovy#Migrating

http://wiki.ros.org/camera_pose_calibration

http://wiki.ros.org/catkin/migrating_from_rosbuild

By the way, if there are common AR or tag-style stacks that allow one to calibration multiple Kinects to one world frame I'm all ears. Right now I'm stuck.

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Originally posted by Athoesen on ROS Answers with karma: 429 on 2014-01-21

Post score: 3

Answer 1

Generally you don't have to switch from rosbuild to catkin when using Hydro. It is still perfectly fine to build your rosbuild package using rosmake. That is not only the case for Groovy and Hydro but will also possible in Indigo (and very likely future releases as well).

The only effort necessary would be to catch up with changes in the packages your code depends on.

The only restriction for rosbuild packages is that you can not release the package anymore and the ROS buildfarm will not create Debian packages for you.

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Originally posted by Dirk Thomas with karma: 16276 on 2014-01-22

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 3

Answer 2

a) There is (as far as I know) no program or tool to automate the migration.

b) I migrated all of my packages and I did not find it too difficult. In the C++/Phython/ msg/srv-files usually you do not have to make any changes. Only you have to create a package.xml in lieu of manifest.xml and change the CMakeLists.txt according to the /catkin/migrating_from_rosbuild you mentioned. This has to be done for each package, though. But the structure of your packages in your workspace you can very much keep below the catkin_ws/src and the dependency structure also very much stays the same.

I can not help you with the multiple kinect part of your question. I think you might better open a separate question on this;)

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Originally posted by Wolf with karma: 7555 on 2014-01-21

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

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Original comments

Comment by Athoesen on 2014-01-22:
"This has to be done for each package"

In other words, this has to be done for camera_pose_calibration and its dependencies, correct? I also am not sure that the image processing is the same. I think that the Openni packages changed between Fuerte and Groovy. Another question is a good idea.