Missing Packages For Download

[mrawding]

Hi,

I noticed that the URL endpoint for the automated download of the libspinnaker packages do not host libspinvideo-c and libspinvideo. Are these packages omitted from the download endpoint for any particular reason?

I've edited the download_spinnaker scripts and CMAKE to support a global apt install, but the broken dependencies are making it slightly tricky and are requiring ignore depends dpkg install instead of being able to use apt.

I am mostly looking for a reason as why they are not provided because I assume there is good reasoning (licensing, distribution, etc)

Side note - I am working on a PR that support rclcpp components. It works flawlessly for downstream packages when using debian version of the spinnaker sdk install. However, when using the download and extraction of library files to "opt" in the colcon build space - they are not exported correctly. I'll try to get the lib depend exports working correctly for component linkage.

[berndpfrommer]

I vaguely remember mucking with the ubuntu 24.04 packages. Note that there is no official FLIR package (last time I checked) supporting Ubuntu 24.04, so the package is constructed from the ubuntu 22.04 version. Did I remove the video libraries because they had dependencies on some libffmpeg stuff that was not there on Ubuntu 24.04? I no longer recall.

I don't quite understand what you mean with rclcpp components support. Isn't that already implemented? See the launch script here.

[mrawding]

Thanks for the response! Yes, launching components via Python is supported, but I have a requirement to load the component from a C++ component container.

While doing that, I ran into a series of link-time issues in downstream packages. To resolve them, I had to modify spinnaker_camera_driver’s CMakeLists.txt so that it properly exports its CMake targets for downstream consumers.

This worked fine when using a system-installed Spinnaker SDK (i.e., globally available via LD_LIBRARY_PATH / ldconfig), but it broke when Spinnaker was downloaded via CMake and only available in the build/install space. In that case, the existing PRIVATE linkage to Spinnaker was insufficient: downstream component executables failed to link because the Spinnaker symbols were not visible through the target’s public link interface.

To fix this, I switched the Spinnaker dependency to PUBLIC and introduced a small spinnaker_vendor package, following the standard ROS 2 vendor-package pattern. This package:

installs the SDK into the workspace prefix,

exports an imported Spinnaker::Spinnaker target,

and ensures correct discovery and linkage for downstream packages.

With this setup, both system-installed Spinnaker and downloaded/vendorized Spinnaker work correctly with C++ component loading.

I think I’m very close to having this fully cleaned up. If there’s interest in supporting this workflow, I’d be happy to submit a PR with the vendor package and updated target/export structure.

[berndpfrommer]

There was some licensing issues as to why we could not distribute the SDK header files, just the binaries. This is what I remember the Clearpath folks (who implemented the downloading of the SDK) telling me. Not sure what the legal situation is for distributing a vendor package with the header files. I cannot find a link to the discussion back then, but there is one here.