[rqt_controller_manager] Cannot handle controller after loading it

[RobertWilbrandt]

rqt_controller_manager doesn't seem to handle controller loading correctly. After Loading a controller, the state column correctly switches to initialized, but the marker doesn't switch from grey to red and it is not possible to right-click on the controller to perform further switches.

When the controller gets switched directly to a different state using a service the gui updates correctly, but unloading and loading the controller again brings back the problem. Load and Start also works correctly.

I created a small reproduction repo at rqt_controller_bug, but i also encountered this with different robot arms (franka panda, ur5) and some custom nodes. I tried to build all relevant projects directly from git in melodic_devel, you can find a wstool file in the linked repo. I think the problem appeared at the end of December 2019, but that is quite uncertain.

I am currently running on ROS melodic on Ubuntu 4.15.0-96-generic, but as this problem seems to appear for colleagues on different systems too that should not really matter too much.

I'll look into solving this and creating a PR by myself, but don't know when i will be able to do so.

[bmagyar]

Potential culprit https://github.com/ros-controls/ros_control/pull/391/files ?

[RobertWilbrandt]

Thank you for the pointer, that indeed seems like the source for this behavior. The PR changed the possible strings in the controller state. 32c74f6 then added the same grey icon as for uninitialized to the new initialized state, but didn't add the appropriate context menu. The PR added more states which simply don't have an item and context menu right now (probably understandable, as all of them shouldn't appear for long).

I will create a PR that adds the context menus and changes icons for all states. The only open point would be whether to change initialized back to red or to change colors slightly so you can differentiate between stopped and just loaded controllers (e.g. orange for stopped and red for loaded, might be useful but i'm not sure if i like that myself).