Publish ros2_rust as a crate on crates.io

[keenanjohnson]

Hey all!

One thing that would really make the use of this library easier is if it was deployed as a crate on cargo.io.

I'm guessing there are probably some technical hurdles left before this is possible, but I would like to help make this happen if possible?

Do any of the maintainers have a sense of what would need to get done before this is possible?

Thanks for the great work!

Related #9

[esteve]

The current owner of the rclrs crate on crates.io has agreed to transfer it. However, even if we publish rclrs on crates.io, it won't be as straightforward as with any other crate, because we need some of the ROS2 infrastructure and message packages still need to be built via colcon for now.

[keenanjohnson]

Yeah definitely understood that it's not as simple as a cargo import, but I think the cargo module would be much better than the current approach I have which is importing the git repo as a submodule as seen here for example: https://github.com/keenanjohnson/ros2_rust_workspace/tree/main/src

[keenanjohnson]

Just checking in on the status of this?

[esteve]

We want the first release to include services (#146), so that users have a minimum set of features (pubsub, rpc) for developing applications, after that we'll be ready to release ros2-rust as a crate.

[keenanjohnson]

Sounds great! Looks like you have done some awesome work in that PR @esteve ! Let us know if you need any additional support there to close that out!

[esteve]

@keenanjohnson yeah, give the PR a try if you have a moment. I estimate I'll tag ros2-rust and release the crate next week, and I'll make the announcement on Discourse. However, not everything will be released on crates.io, the code generator for example and all the build tools will be released separately.

[esteve]

@keenanjohnson I've updated the description of this discussion to point to crates.io (instead of cargo.io). We had a ticket open (#9) a while ago that I've linked to.

[keenanjohnson]

Hey all! I see that #146 was merged a while ago. Is the plan still to release on crates.io soon or are there other blockers here?

[nnmm]

We did publish the last two releases to crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/rclrs

[keenanjohnson]

Oh excellent! Are there specific instructions anywhere for installing via cargo? I had looked at the readme but didn’t see any so I had assumed it wasn’t publish yet. I know in the chat channel at some point it was discussed that there would still be additional steps after the standard cargo install command to get it to work.

…

On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 11:38 PM Nikolai Morin ***@***.***> wrote: We did publish the last two releases to crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/rclrs — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#86 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AATQ3FTXBEZRD5LIYCOPJZ3WEKTGTANCNFSM5RU24RLA> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[nnmm]

cargo install is only for binaries, so you only need to write rclrs = 0.3 in your Cargo.toml and have a ROS installation sourced.

If you want to use message packages however, you additionally need to

1. Add to your workspace
   • rosidl_generator_rs from ros2_rust
   • https://github.com/ros2/rosidl_core.git and https://github.com/ros2/rosidl_defaults.git
   • The message packages you want to generate Rust code for
2. Add the proper dependency to your Cargo.toml, e.g. geometry_msgs = "*"
3. Run colcon build to generate the Rust package and set up .cargo/config.toml

I should check if the build instructions are still up to date.