Bug#833383: ros-std-msgs: split headers and message definitions

[ddomenichelli at drdanz.it]

‎Hello Jochen,

> Interesting point, what would be the use case?

These messages definition could be used to generate bindings for other programming languages and/or frameworks.
In my specific case, in YARP (another middleware for robotics similar to ROS) we have a way to publish/subscribe to ROS publisher and subscribers, and we have a tool to generate bindings for ROS messages that do not use ROS libraries using the message definition.
We have a very small number of dependencies, and we cannot use the -dev package because it depends on many other packages, therefore at the moment we are forced to include in each module a copy of the definition of the messages used, but that's obviously redundant, and it would be a lot better if they were installed somewhere on the system.

> Should we put it into an extra package or in the library?

I'd like to have it in a separate package, with a very small number of dependencies.
In an ideal situation I'd like to call from CMake something like this:

 find_package(std_msgs REQUIRED)
 generate_bindings("$std_msgs_MSG_DIR}/std_msgs/String.msg")


Cheers,
 Daniele