ROS tools not found in PowerShell on Windows

[binitshah]

On Windows 10 x86 64bit, ROS tools like roscore, rostopic, etc. all work fine with Command Prompt. But when I run roscore with PowerShell, I see the following:

(ros) PS C:\Users\Binit Shah> roscore
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\ProgramData\Miniconda3\envs\ros\Library\bin\roscore", line 36, in <module>
    from rosmaster.master_api import NUM_WORKERS
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'rosmaster'

rostopic, rosservice, and the others show similar ModuleNotFoundErrors.

[Tobias-Fischer]

See conda-forge/gazebo-feedstock#42 for a related issue ..

/Cc @traversaro @wolfv

[binitshah]

Ah okay, sounds like there isn't a .ps1 activation script for PowerShell yet. If there's already a tracking issue, I can close this one.

[Tobias-Fischer]

I don't really know what's needed to get this working. If you have an idea, please feel free to open a pull request - this would be a great addition 👍

[binitshah]

Thanks for the quick replies, I'll try to help with this.

[traversaro]

If there's already a tracking issue, I can close this one.

Thanks for reporting the issue! The issue conda-forge/gazebo-feedstock#42 is related but it is not tracking the same problem as gazebo is a standalone conda-forge recipe that it is not related to the ROS packages generated on the robostack repo. If you want to look into the issue, I guess you should look in https://github.com/RoboStack/vinca/blob/master/vinca/template.py#L89 that is the code that generates the activation scripts for ROS packages, using the templates in https://github.com/RoboStack/vinca/tree/master/vinca/templates .

[binitshah]

Thanks for the info @traversaro. On Gitter, I've seen mention of multisheller. Is it worth looking into that and if so, are there any examples of it being used here yet?

[traversaro]

Thanks for the info @traversaro. On Gitter, I've seen mention of multisheller. Is it worth looking into that and if so, are there any examples of it being used here yet?

I guess that in the ROS use case, multisheller may not be useful, as in ROS packages you already have the setup.bat for each package, and you need to call those one also in powershell, or understand if catkin can generate setup scripts for powershell.

[binitshah]

Ah okay. Thanks for your help.

[traversaro]

I looked a bit into this, and from the vinca point of view, it should be sufficient to add the activate.ps1.in and deactivate.ps1.in in https://github.com/RoboStack/vinca/tree/master/vinca/templates .

However, the problem for ROS1 is that catkin does not support at the moment generating PowerShell environment scripts (see https://github.com/ros/catkin/blob/203a57ad70430ae165ebe014738a37c3af3e9166/cmake/catkin_generate_environment.cmake#L102 for the supported shells), so for solving that we should either add this to catkin, or add it as a catkin patch. I also looked if there was some way of "sourcing" .bat scripts in powershell, but I could not find any.

The nice thing is that instead on ROS2 ament_cmake/colcon already supports generating .ps1 environment scripts (see https://colcon.readthedocs.io/en/released/developer/environment.html#entry-points), so supporing PowerShell on ROS2 would be easier, as it would only require to modify vinca to generate the correct activation scripts.