Proposal: remove edit_name from factory message

[osrf-migration]

Original report (archived issue) by Louise Poubel (Bitbucket: chapulina, GitHub: chapulina).

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Summary

The entity_factory message has an edit_name field which is supposed to edit an existing model, instead of spawning a new one. On Gazebo <= 9 this has limited support. I suggest we remove it in favour of using other message types for more granular entity updates.

Motivation

• Simplify the factory message: it should be used only to spawn new entities, not to edit them
• Simplify implementation: to fully support editing an existing entity from any arbitrary SDF means that we either truly support any changes, such as new kinematics, or we print lots of errors to catch all the unsupported cases. Instead, we can have dedicated messages for editing specific things in simulation that are well defined and tested, like changing pose, scale, name...

Describe alternatives you've considered

We can keep the field and deal with all the corner cases that will come up.

Alternatively, we could document the scope of what the edit_name should be able to accomplish. For example, on Gazebo 9 it doesn't support adding a link.

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Louise Poubel (Bitbucket: chapulina, GitHub: chapulina).

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• changed title from "Proposal: remove entity_name from factory message" to "Proposal: remove edit_name from factory message"

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Louise Poubel (Bitbucket: chapulina, GitHub: chapulina).

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Just found a related issue on Gazebo: https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/issues/1954

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Louise Poubel (Bitbucket: chapulina, GitHub: chapulina).

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Pull request #86

[osrf-migration]

Original comment by Steve Peters (Bitbucket: Steven Peters, GitHub: scpeters).

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• changed state from "new" to "resolved"

Pull request #86