MRT Build Tools

The MRT tools are a collection of usefull command-line tools for developing, working with and distributing code at the MRT. If there are any errors, please contact Claudio or have a look at the Gitlab issue site.

Installation

The MRT tools are automatically installed when the mrt_init script is executed. See the install instructions for more infos. If you have run the init script before and your apt-get repos are set up, you can install the MRT tools with:

    $ sudo apt-get install mrt-build-tools

Development

If you'd like to work on a editable copy of the MRT tools, follow the instructions given here

Getting Started

Using the MRT tools is as easy as typing:

    $ mrt

Getting help

You can always get help by appending --help to any command, e.g.

$ mrt --help
Usage: mrt [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

    A toolbelt full of mrt scripts.

Options:
 1. -help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
	catkin       A wrapper for catkin.
	gitlab       Gitlab related tools
	maintenance  Repair tools...
	pkg          Package related tasks...
	snapshot     Save or restore the current state of the...
	ws           A collection of tools to perform on a catkin...
	wstool       A wrapper for wstool.

Example usage

Day 1:

First of, you want to get started by creating a new workspace. The toolset contains a bunch of tools to operate on workspaces you can get a list by typing mrt ws --help

    $ mkdir catkin_ws
    $ cd catkin_ws
    $ mrt ws init

or in short

    $ mrt ws init catkin_ws

This will initialize a new catkin workspace in the catkin_ws directory.

Next, you want to grab some existing software from the MRT-Gitlab. You can find a bunch of tools for working with (code-)packages via the mrt pkg --help command. Let's download the "calib_tool".

    $ mrt pkg add calib_tool

This will download and install all dependencies required for compiling the desired package.\

Hint: Try using bash autocompletion on any of these command. For mrt pkg add it will present you with a list of all packages you have access to.

Now let's go ahead and compile the code. Therefor we are going to use mrt catkin, which adds a convenient wrapper around the catkin tools. This makes it inrelevant in which directory you are. Further more, you can pass special flags like -rd(resolve dependecies) or --verbose additional to the normal catkin flags to it.

    $ mrt catkin build

Day 2:

Welcome back, before we start of, let's see whether someone else might have worked on the code in the meanwhile. cd to your workspace and perform a

    $ mrt ws update

This will perform a git pull in every package within your workspaces "src" folder. This comes in handy, once you have a lot of repos in there.\

Hint: There's also mrt ws info and mrt ws status to get information on any changed filed, or unpushed commits in your repos.

If you are looking for even more functionallity to operate on a large set on repositories, have a look at mrt wstool which is a wrapper for the wstool suite.

Let us create a new package now. Creating a new C++ catkin package called "your_package" can be done via

    $ mrt pkg create your_package

It will ask you whether to create a library or an executable, whether it should be a ROS package and whether you want to create a new Gitlab repository with it. You'll end up with a new package in your workspace's "src" folder, containing a sample "CMakeLists.txt", "package.xml" and a sample test. For more infos on these files, see MRT cmake modules.

Day 3:

Ok, now you have created a bunch of code, got it all up and running and want to perform a demonstration on one of the cars? Perfect!

Let me present to you the mrt snapshot functionality. With this you can easily capture the momentary state of your workspace and preserve it (hopefully) until eternity.

    $ mrt snapshot create the_big_demo

will create a "the_big_demo_[date].snapshot" file, which you can restore on any machine using:

    $ mrt snapshot restore "the_big_demo_[date].snapshot"

We are storing all snapshot files on "/mrtstorage/demo_snapshots".

Day X:

Now that you are used to the MRT tools, have a look at all the other commands, e.g.

    $ mrt gitlab ...
    $ mrt maintenance ...

Configuration

After installation, MRT tools are configured with the default settings. These are for example:

• "https" is used instead of "ssh"

• Git credentials are cached for 1 hour.

• Default ssh path... You can change these and other settings by using

    $ mrt maintenance settings

Further reading

• ROS catkin: http://docs.ros.org/api/catkin/html/Catkin

• ROS dep: http://docs.ros.org/independent/api/rosdep/html/

• wstool: http://wiki.ros.org/wstool

• rosinstall: http://docs.ros.org/independent/api/rosinstall/html/