omniidl-python not explicitly searched for as dependency

[wxmerkt]

• When omniidl is not installed the CMake fails during configure.
• However, omniidl-python not being present only fails during compilation.

[nim65s]

Hi, and thanks for the report.

Unfortunately, this software is weirdly packaged and I am not sure how to detect it.

The omniidlexecutable is owned by the omniidl package on Ubuntu, but it is part of the omniORB upstream package.

The omniidl-python ubuntu package provides files that are part of the omniORBpy upstream package.

And other distributions provide it in different ways.

So in gepetto-viewer-corba, we check for omniORB, as it provides a .pc file, but this does not imply that the omniidl executable is available (it does in Fedora & ArchLinux for example, but not on Ubuntu).
And for the content of the omniidl-python ubuntu package, it is even harder, as omniORBpy does not provide a .pc file…

[wxmerkt]

I see - perhaps having the list of to be installed dependencies (as a copy paste apt-get) in the README could resolve this.

We package our packages via the ROS buildfarm (even if not explicitly ROS dependent) and via catkin. It served us better as our previous pkg-config-self-written-scripts based approach in combatting dependency problems (we used MIT's pods approach before).

[nim65s]

We should be able to generate this list for all of our packages, and put that in READMEs, which would avoid issues like this one. In fact, this list is already available and used to generate Dockerfiles for our CI.

But manually adding this list would lead to yet another documentation that will not be tested, then forgotten, and then out of date, as it is already the case in most of our packages…

About the ROS buildfarm, we tried at some point to use it, but we lack manpower. We should be able to try again after having automatized most maintenance tasks.

Meanwhile, robotpkg provides what we need, and is also providing an alternative ROS buildfarm, which help a growing number of people having troubles with the main one.

[wxmerkt]

Are the Dockerfiles for the CI public? If so we could extract dependencies for there or link to it.

[nim65s]

They are not yet publicly available, and it would requires as much job to put them public than to add the generate a part of the README.
I will do this in a few days.