ROS2 package demo 5 - more on documentation

I’m hoping today to get a basic package documentation done, with automatic generation using github actions.

Issues with building

Unfortunately I tried using the builds from the tasks, which are colcon build --merge-install --symlink-install ... but these do not work when I try to source the workspace outside of Docker. Apparently the symbolic links use symbolic links to filenames that are not valid outside of Docker, like:

ros@ubutower:/workspaces/fqdemo_ws/install/share/fqdemo_nodes$ ls -l local_setup.bash
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ros ros 87 Nov 24 18:48 local_setup.bash -> /workspaces/fqdemo_ws/build/fqdemo_nodes/ament_cmake_environment_hooks/local_setup.bash

When I try to run . install/setup.bash outside of the Docker container, this fails.

In VSCode, Docker, and ROS2 I see that Allison does not specify the –symlink-install option. I think I need to remove that by default, and only use it for special python development.

Documenting the packages

I added some documentation to fqdemo-nodes, and I generally get something useful when I run at the package level: `doxygen doc/Doxyfile. Tried the same thing with fqdemo-msgs, I get nothing. Need to figure that out.

I just discovered https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosdoc2 which looks promising.

rosdoc2 says to install, run pip install -U rosdoc2. But pip can’t find it, neither can Pypi.

Tried installing from source. I cloned the repo, and ran:

$ python3 setup.py build
$ sudo python3 setup.py install

Now I have it. Ran it, it worked somewhat on fqdemo_nodes, not on fqdemo_msgs.