Setting up development environment for making changes on gz-sim, gz-math, gz-sensors

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Hello @altineller , thanks for asking, interesting topic in which we can improve documentation probably.

Reviewing our Contributing code section Contributing to Gazebo — Gazebo ionic documentation I think that there are some hints about how to run different aspects but we probably don’t have the full documentation on setup the development platform/environment.

[A. Main use case: building a single gz library]

I’ll try to create a documentation PR to improve the existing documentation but for the use case of having Gazebo installed using the Ubuntu binary packages (not the ROS packages) the course of action I would do is:

  1. Be sure that you know what release of Gazebo you are using (this table can help matching versions with Gazebo releases, i.e: gz-common6 is on Gazebo Ionic)
  2. With the version of Gazebo, you can check in the main install page if you system is supported or you need a container or other virtualization artifact (i.e: Ubuntu Noble is supported for Gazebo Ionic).
  3. Get the binary dependencies using standard apt on the source package or the main -dev package:apt build-dep <libgz-$pkg-dev> (i.e apt-get build-dep gz-common6 or apt-get build-dep libgz-common6-dev)
  4. Download the gz repository and be sure of using the right branch that match with the version you are interested into. Document here is quite good. (i.e clone the gz-common repository and place it in gz-common6 branch).
  5. You can proceed with the usual cmake and make commands, something like cmake -B build -S . and cmake --build build.

[B. Alternative using the tools vcs and colcon instead of plain CMake]
[B. Alternative for developing multiple gz libraries at the same time]
[B. Alternative to use Gazebo and ROS together]

If you are familiar with ROS tools vcs and colcon and want to use them to develop Gazebo libraries and/or you need to make changes in several gz libraries at the same time and/or you will be running Gazebo with ROS, the alternative to the points above:

  1. , 2. and 3. are the same than above in use case A.
  2. Create a colcon workspace (a ws/src directory mainly).
  3. Download the gz-* libraries code from the yaml files in GitHub - gazebo-tooling/gazebodistro: Files defining the Open Robotics dependencies (using vcs import src/ < gz-$lib.yaml)
  4. You are good to run colcon with the usual set of parameters (colcon build --packages-select or --package-up-to depending if you want to build gz-libs from source or use the binary dependencies).
  5. Be sure of sourcing the colcon workspace so the loader select first the modified versions of the libraries in your colcon workspace (i.e . install/setup.bash).

It should be possible starting on ROS 2 Jazzy to use a different path playing with the ROS 2 Gazebo vendor packages but after writing it I prefer the simplicity of the Option B. I leave it here the instructions if someone is interested How to setup a colcon workspace to develop gz libraries code using ROS 2 Gazebo vendor packages. · GitHub.

Hope it helps.