qiBuild and rosbuild

Introduction

This section is targeted towards rosbuild users wanting to know more about qiBuild

General comparison

First, qiBuild and rosbuild have much in common.

They are both based on CMake, and provide a set of tools written in Python to manage multiple projects, and dependencies between projects.

The CMake frameworks have both a public and a private API.

What is in qiBuild and not in rosbuild

  • Automatic creation of installation rules.
  • Ability to create redistributable, pre-compiled packages. (ROS supports generation of .deb packages, though)
  • Strong cross-platform support. Supports both UNIX makefiles and Visual Studio projects. (Basically everything that is supported by CMake should run fine with qiBuild)
  • Easy cross-compilation
  • Handling of multiple build configurations with the same source directories.
  • Loosly coupling between the command line tools and the CMake framework: you can use qibuild script to build pure-cmake projects, you do not need the qibuild script to use CMake qibuild functions
  • Close to CMake standards: packages made with qiBuild do NOT depend on the qibuild CMake framework.
  • qitoolchain provides a clean way to package and use third-party dependencies without touching the system, which will work on any Linux distribution.

What is in rosbuild and not in qiBuild

  • Parallel build of dependencies
  • Nice shell features: nice output, auto-completion, roscd, etc...
  • Tight coupling between rosmake (the build system), roslib (the library for communication), and generation of messages
  • Nice Python support : automatic handling of $PYTHONPATH variable, rospython, ...

Table of equivalences

Initialisation

rosbuild

include($ENV{ROS_ROOT}/core/rosbuild/rosbuild.cmake)
rosbuild_init()

Need a few environment variables to be set.

qibuild

include(${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/qibuild.cmake)

User has to copy/paste a qibuild.cmake files everywhere, but this file can update itself.

Code generation

rosbuild

rosbuild_genmsg()
rosbuild_gensrv()

qibuild

N/A : loose coupling between the messaging library and the build framework. Could be implemented in qibuild/cmake ?

Output paths

rosbuild

set(EXECUTABLE_OUTPUT_PATH ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/bin})

Output path is inside source dir.

qibuild

N/A : automatically set. Default SDK layout.

Output path is inside build dir, in a directory named sdk/ (temporary build results are NOT in build/sdk)

Adding executables

rosbuild

rosbuild_add_executable()

qibuild

qi_create_bin()

Adding libraries

rosbuild

rosbuild_add_library()

qibuild

qi_create_lib()

Management of dependencies

rosbuild

  • Looks for dependencies using rosdep and manifest.xml
  • Try to apt-get them when relevant
  • Run make inside the source dirs of the “buildable” dependencies.
  • make runs cmake which launches rospack to get the compile flags and include dirs.

qibuild

  • Looks for dependencies using qibuild and qibuild.manifest
  • Never tries to install anything, uses libraries from the system when found or can use pre-compiled packages with qitoolchain.
  • Runs cmake inside the source dirs of the buildable dependencies, during qibuild configure, then cmake –build inside the build directories of the buildable dependencies, during qibuild make

Interface with other build systems

rosbuild

rospack : command line tool, may be used by any build system

qibuild

  • generates and installs standard CMake files, usable by any CMake based projects. (implementing a rospack like functionality would not be hard, though)

Boost dependency

rosbuild

rosbuild_add_boost_directories()
rosbuild_link_boost(${PROJECT_NAME} thread)

qibuild

qi_use_lib(myproject BOOST_THREAD)

Easily do-able for other third-party libraries

Swig

rosbuild

include($ENV{ROS_ROOT}/core/rosbuild/rosbuild.cmake)
rosbuild_init()
find_package(PythonLibs REQUIRED)
rosbuild_add_swigpy_library(python_foo foo foo_swig_generated.cpp bar.cpp)
target_link_libraries(python_foo ${PYTHON_LIBRARIES})

qibuild

include(qibuild/swig/python)
qi_swig_wrap_python(_foo foo.i
  SRC bar.cpp
  DEPENDS ...)

Using qiBuild with rosbuild

Patching qiBuild to be able to compile rosbuild projects is probably doable, but maybe not that useful. (Why would rosbuild users want to change their build system?)

What could be nice instead is to make it easy to use rosbuild pre-compiled packages from qibuild projects, using for instance a toolchain feed so that the rosbuild packages only have to be compiled once.

« qiBuild and CMake | qiBuild compared to other build frameworks | qiBuild and qmake »
« previous | up | next »