Organise and document legacy support for Gazebo9/Melodic, Gazebo11/Noetic

[srmainwaring]

The main branch and new development are focussed on Gazebo Garden / ROS2 Humble and later versions, however there are periodically requests for versions that run on ROS Noetic / Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal). There are a number of branches under feature that will compile and run for Gazebo11 but contain the initial development code for FFT waves. These need to be better organised and documented and put into an archive / maintenance state.

The initial version targeting Gazebo9/ROS Melodic/Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) should have a counterpart for Gazebo11/ROS Noetic/Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) that does not include the FFT development code and is interface compatible with the earlier version.

Some of the re-organisation has been partially addressed in #99, #101, #102 and #103.

Tasks

Gazebo9

• Add branch gazebo9 for Gazebo9/ROS Melodic/Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic).
• Replace Travis CI with GitHub Actions using an ubuntu-18.04 runner.
• Update documentation in gazebo9 branch.
• Update documentation for legacy support in master branch.

Gazebo11

• Add branch gazebo11 for Gazebo11/ROS Noetic/Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal).
• Replace Travis CI with GitHub Actions using an ubuntu-20.04 runner.
• Update documentation in gazebo11 branch.
• Update documentation for legacy support in master branch.

Gazebo11 / FFT Waves

There are three branches under feature that contain the initial development for FFT waves. These have been ported to Gazebo11 at different stages (via a merge of fe74d47) and contain different feature sets. Usually code for release would not be rebased, however it will be much cleaner to organise these branches with a linear history rebased on the gazebo11 branch described in the section above (and feature branches are development). The proposal is to create rebased versions of the branches under feature renaming them, and eventually removing the original branches after a warning period.

Current structure of feature/ branches

• feature/gazebo11 and feature/fft_waves have a last common commit at 00b89df
• feature/gazebo11 and feature/ardupilot_sailboat_poc have a last common commit at 00b89df
• feature/fft_waves and feature/ardupilot_sailboat_poc have a last common commit at 67e1cda

Reorganised structure of feature/ branches

• From feature/gazebo11 create branch feature/fft-waves-v1 rebased on gazebo11.
• From feature/fft_waves create branch feature/fft-waves-v2 rebased on feature/fft-waves-v1.
• From feature/ardupilot_sailboat_poc create branch feature/fft-waves-v3 rebased on feature/fft-waves-v2.
• Ensure all branches have CI with GitHub Actions using an ubuntu-20.04 runner.
• Update documentation for each branch.
• Update documentation for legacy development / feature/ branch support in master.
• Update downstream projects https://github.com/srmainwaring/sail_sim_docker (depends on feature/fft_waves).

Related Issues

Previous issues requesting / discussing support for ROS Noetic.

• Noetic Compliance #12
• Performance issue #13
• libHydrodynamicsPlugin.so init function Issue #14
• Noetic Setup #68
• Any one got a fork of this that works on ROS1 Noetic? #98