API review

Proposer: Rob Wheeler

Present at review:

Question / concerns / comments

realtime publisher/srv
- make methods that are not part of the public api (such as "publishingLoop" etc) private.
- document public api
- the publishing/call loop should only lock the buffer when there is new data available. Periodically locking it causes many trylock's to fail.
realtime infuser
- document public api

There's a great need of doxygen.

I believe that this is the only user of BufferedData* messages I would propose to pull them into this package. They are used for debugging, and as far as I can see noone is using them in code. They will be most useful for rostopic which can handle finding them.
The APIs need summaries of expected uses and conditions where it's appropriate to use these classes and where not.

talk to kevin about realtime srv
move recoder to .. (stu decide) ->
- see if realtime publisher can support this functionality
- have realtime array publisher? -> roadmap
realtime publisher drops msgs in buffer between realtime and non-realtime
- can ros take msgs at 1kHz? -> done from ethercat
- recorder limits bandwidth usage
infuser
- get data from non-reltime into realtime
- limited to 1 reader because of allocation question in rt
- use in realtiem publisher?
- look at rt fifo's. Josh maybe found one
- set policy for when one side can't keep up
- we are not using infuser: it does not support what we need for the trajectory controller
- could create infuser that uses locks and priority inversion as we do now in trajectory controller
- proposal:
  - write realtime box (stu)
  - kill realtime infuser

Package status change mark change manifest)