porting to aravis 0.8

[alexswerner]

Hi,

I had a couple of issues with a specifc camera/ laser profiler (MLSL124). With aravis 0.8 the camera seems to work so I started porting the library to this version. It compiles and publishes frames, the code is here https://github.com/alexswerner/camera_aravis/tree/aravis_0.8 . It was mostly trivial migration focussed on error handling. Not sure if everything is correct. One issue I'm aware of is that with our setup, the first frame is published repeatedly but new data from the camera does not reach the subscriber.

Alex

[bmegli]

There is also this fork with aravis 0.8 port

• https://github.com/earthrover/camera_aravis/tree/port_aravis_0.8

It kind of adds a layer of abstraction for aravis calls.

• in theory it could be extended to support both 0.8 and 0.6 depending on aravis build with
• but practice is more complex as 0.8 apart from API changes has new functionality
  • and it is new functionality that makes people migrate

FWIW, I build up some functionality on top when I needed functions from aravis 0.8 and it also works ok.

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I suppose migration to 0.8 is complex topic for maintenance reasons:

• camera_aravis now mostly supports ROS Noetic (Ubuntu 20.04)
  • Noetic EOLs May 2025, but will likely become final and stable ROS1 for next decade(s)
• in Ubuntu 20.04, there is only official package for aravis 0.6
• so porting to 0.8 would require
  • supplying aravis 0.8 for Ubuntu 20.04
  • or supplying 0.8 library version installed to ROS Noetic tree (say ros-noetic-libaravis-0.8)