Chocolately package

[jacobperron]

Greetings, orocos kdl is available upstream in Debian and Ubuntu and being added to rosdistro (https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/23841). I also noticed that it's available via brew (https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/orocos-kdl). For the ROS 2 project, we are currently relying on a fork for building and packaging orocos kdl on Windows. Given that orocos kdl is available upstream for our other supported platforms, it would be great to have a version available on Windows. I think this would let us move away from depending on a from-source build of orocos kdl.

This is a call for any interest in publishing / maintaining a chocolately package for orocos kdl.

@seanyen, perhaps there is interested from people involved with the ROS on Windows project?

[seanyen]

@jacobperron Thanks for pinging me. Not sure have you heard of this project? And I have been bootstrapping many system packages on conda-forge for Windows build. I also got a sandbox channel https://anaconda.org/ros-playground which has a prototyping ros-eloquent-desktop build, shadows all xyz_vendor packages and uses the system packages provided by conda-forge. I just want to amplify the potential of conda-forge ecosystem.

And btw, here are two packages of the interested: https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/python-orocos-kdl https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/orocos-kdl

Let me know what do you think. (cc @wolfv)

[wolfv]

Thanks for pinging me, Sean.

Yes, indeed, I've been working quite a bit on conda packages for the ROS ecosystem. It would be awesome if it got more attention at OSRF (I also talked quite a bit about our challenges with @tfoote at ROSCON). Yesterday we got Gazebo to work on Linux as well, which shows that conda-forge can handle OGRE + QT applications quite well (it was already working since a while on Windows thanks to @seanyen).

Locally I also had builds for RViz and other QT based packages, so we could indeed have a full distribution of ros-*-desktop on conda :)

[mganglb]

Hello, for people like me, who stumble over this thread while looking for an Windows version of pykdl. here are my steps to get it running:

conda create -n myenv python=3.6
conda activate myenv
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --set channel_priority strict
conda install -c conda-forge python-orocos-kdl 
#conda install python-orocos-kdl (not sure what is the difference)

python
import PyKDL

surely not the correct / best way. But it works.

[wolfv]

@mganglb yes, that is the correct way.

-c conda-forge means you're using the "conda-forge" channel, and is the same as adding it to your configuration (which you were doing with the lines above).

Channels are like PPA's on Ubuntu, or other software package collections.

Glad to hear that it works. We have a lot more packages for conda now as part of the RoboStack initiative: https://medium.com/robostack/cross-platform-conda-packages-for-ros-fa1974fd1de3 (for Windows, OS X and Linux)