The following are the key points to bear in mind while creating and maintaining a package:
- Version control: ROS supports version control using Git, Mercurial, and Subversion. We can host our code in GitHub and Bitbucket. Most of the ROS packages are in GitHub.
- Packaging: Inside an ROS catkin package, there will be a
package.xml
, and this file should contain the author name, description, and license. The following is an example of apackage.xml
:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <package> <name>roscpp_tutorials</name> <version>0.6.1</version> <description> This package attempts to show the features of ROS step-by-step, including using messages, servers, parameters, etc. </description> <maintainer email="[email protected]">Dirk Thomas</maintainer> <license>BSD</license> <url type="website">http://www.ros.org/wiki/roscpp_tutorials</url> ...