After so many years of ROS, why hasn't Mac OSX been stabilized?

answered 2012-12-02 21:33:16 -0600

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Maintaining a huge software system for many platforms is hard and it gets even harder because ROS packages are not created by only one group of developers but by many institutions all over the world, most often in an academic environment. To provide full support for OSX, every developer who is releasing packages would need to port his code on OSX besides the normal Ubuntu platforms. Since there are not even OSX virtual machines, this would require to own a Mac. I don't thing this is feasible.

But ROS is open source and if you are missing something, you can volunteer for maintaining ROS packages for OSX. I'm sure the community would be really happy about that.

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Thank you Lorenz, you pointed on a really important point. OS`s which do not support VMs will not be used much for professional development. From my point of view Mac OSX will never be really in focus of ROS as there is even no embedded Mac hardware which you can use for building a commercial robot.

tlinder ( 2012-12-03 05:59:27 -0600 )edit

The move to catkin + Qt should actually help to at least run tools and GUIs on Macs, which seems to be the primary usage (I can't say I've ever seen a MacOSX+ROS based robot, but I've seen lots of people using Macs to develop code on PR2s or other robots).

fergs ( 2012-12-03 23:00:15 -0600 )edit

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After so many years of ROS, why hasn't Mac OSX been stabilized?

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After so many years of ROS, why hasn't Mac OSX been stabilized?