CMake Project Examples

[stonier]

To put under CI and be instructive about how to pull Drake into a CMake project. Pulling is via find_package or ExternalProjectAdd.

@RussTedrake would also like to show (I agree) a lightweight Travis build using a hosted tarball of the installation.

[stonier]

How does the above sound?

[RussTedrake]

Linking to RobotLocomotion/drake#6149 (for those with access).

The above sounds great. Almost any of the simple executables in the examples directory would be appropriate here. For instance, implementing examples/simple_continuous_time_system again, but using drake as an external. Perhaps a similarly simple example using the optimization library, too. Goal is to document/prototype how we think external projects should use drake.

[stonier]

@jamiesnape we need some concrete examples to validate it. As Russ mentioned, examples/simple_continuous_time_system is a good example and I think sufficient for a first pass.

[jamiesnape]

Sounds good.

[stonier]

Let's drop that example in all the drake examples (i.e. bazel and cmake). We should also drop the hello world code then just to keep it simple.

[jamiesnape]

Cool, working on it now.

[jamiesnape]

Note that the licenses are currently different for this repo and drake and hence simple_continuous_time_system.cc.

[stonier]

Oversight, let's sync the license here with Drake's.

[stonier]

Some update. We cannot do Travis, it has no support for Ubuntu/Xenial. CircleCI is another option, but 2.0 with Xenial support only released yesterday. Likely to be bumpy. There are other options that may be feasible, e.g. docker container builds, but these are likely to be sufficiently complex to defeat the purpose.

For now we will just drop in a simple bash script build on Jenkins. Bash scripts in the project examples.

[stonier]

Task List for the 20170713-14 sprint:

Target Platform: Ubuntu/Xenial

• Upload a tarball snapshot of drake (where?)
• CMake find_package project example copies and compiles examples/simple_continuous_time_system
• CMake ExternalProject_Add project example copies and compiles examples/simple_continuous_time_system
• Jenkins bash scripts inside both cmake project examples
• Jenkins jobs on our CI server that builds each cmake project examples (nightly?)
• A nice README.md in each project example

Stretch

• Jenkins CI job to build and host the tarball, nightly
• Pointing a group of closed beta testers (Russ' friends) to road test this

[RussTedrake]

@rdeits, @tkoolen -- any ideas for getting around lack of ubuntu support?

[jwnimmer-tri]

Travis-CI says to use Docker if you want a Xenial build environment travis-ci/travis-ci#5821 (comment). I think that's a fine approach for a Xenial flavor of the a prebuilt-Drake-in-other-CI example.

[jamiesnape]

I think CircleCI 2.0 would work best for us at this stage.

[rdeits]

I set up xenial testing with Docker on Travis for Director: https://github.com/RobotLocomotion/director/blob/master/.travis.yml and it was actually pretty easy.

[stonier]

Most jobs covered in PR #8. Will follow up on the remaining in individual issues.