porting to aravis 0.8

[alexswerner]

porting to aravis 0.8

[bmegli]

There is also this fork with aravis 0.8 port

• https://github.com/earthrover/camera_aravis/tree/port_aravis_0.8

It kind of adds a layer of abstraction for aravis calls.

• in theory it could be extended to support both 0.8 and 0.6 depending on aravis build with
• but practice is more complex as 0.8 apart from API changes has new functionality
  • and it is new functionality that makes people migrate

FWIW, I build up some functionality on top when I needed functions from aravis 0.8 and it also works ok.

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I suppose migration to 0.8 is complex topic for maintenance reasons:

• camera_aravis now mostly supports ROS Noetic (Ubuntu 20.04)
  • Noetic EOLs May 2025, but will likely become final and stable ROS1 for next decade(s)
• in Ubuntu 20.04, there is only official package for aravis 0.6
• so porting to 0.8 would require
  • supplying aravis 0.8 for Ubuntu 20.04
  • or supplying 0.8 library version installed to ROS Noetic tree (say ros-noetic-libaravis-0.8)