Mastering ROS for Robotics Programming - Second Edition

Creating a ROS package

The ROS packages are the basic unit of the ROS system. We can create a ROS package, build it, and release it to the public. The current distribution of ROS we are using is kinetic. We are using the catkin build system to build ROS packages. A build system is responsible for generating 'targets' (executable/libraries) from a raw source code that can be used by an end user. In older distributions, such as Electric and Fuerte, rosbuild was the build system. Because of the various flaws of rosbuild, catkin came into existence, which is basically based on Cross Platform Make (CMake). This has a lot of advantages, such as porting the package into another operating system, such as Windows. If an OS supports CMake and Python, ...