Provide rosdep key for libserial-dev

[traversaro]

See https://index.ros.org/d/libserial-dev/ . This is only used by feetech_ros2_driver, but I stumbled in it by looking at ros-physical-ai's demo pixi.toml : https://github.com/ros-physical-ai/demos/blob/25f5dddc5a32cbae69a903674dc13ed0309b2d35/pixi.toml#L152-L160 .

To workaround the fact that on conda-forge we do not have libserial-dev, they mix apt packages and conda packages, and it would be ideal if users do not do that for countless reasons.

To fix this, we would just need to package libserial-dev, but the situation is a bit complex on that: the upstream library https://github.com/wjwwood/serial is officially abandoned, see wjwwood/serial#312 . I happen to mantain a friendly fork of that library as we use it in my organization at https://github.com/gbionics/serial_cpp, but that is not a drop-in replacement, so we can't package that in conda-forge and use it as a key for libserial-dev.

I think a possible strategy to deal with this is:

• Add an additional output to https://github.com/gbionics/serial_cpp to ensure that it can be a drop-in replacement for libserial-dev
• Package https://github.com/gbionics/serial_cpp in conda-forge
• Add a rosdep key for libserial-dev

fyi @sea-bass as you seem to be involved in https://github.com/ros-physical-ai/demos .

[sea-bass]

The wjwood serial repo was indeed abandoned; for the ROS 2 Robotiq gripper driver, we officially depend on https://github.com/tylerjw/serial, which also was never added to buildfarm but 100% works from source.

[traversaro]

The wjwood serial repo was indeed abandoned; for the ROS 2 Robotiq gripper driver, we officially depend on https://github.com/tylerjw/serial, which also was never added to buildfarm but 100% works from source.

Thanks for the reference, but also that repo seems quite abandoned and without tags, so it may be tricky to bring it in conda-forge.

[traversaro]

• Add an additional output to https://github.com/gbionics/serial_cpp to ensure that it can be a drop-in replacement for libserial-dev

For reference, feetech_ros2_driver (that I noticed now that its maintainer is @JafarAbdi ) is finding serial with:

find_package(PkgConfig REQUIRED)
pkg_check_modules(SERIAL libserial REQUIRED)

and then consuming it with:

target_include_directories(serial_port SYSTEM PUBLIC ${SERIAL_INCLUDE_DIRS}) target_link_libraries(serial_port PUBLIC fmt::fmt spdlog::spdlog tl::expe

so we need to provide the same interface in the drop-in compat shim of serial_cpp .

[traversaro]

To fix this, we would just need to package libserial-dev, but the situation is a bit complex on that: the upstream library https://github.com/wjwwood/serial is officially abandoned, see wjwwood/serial#312 . I happen to mantain a friendly fork of that library as we use it in my organization at https://github.com/gbionics/serial_cpp, but that is not a drop-in replacement, so we can't package that in conda-forge and use it as a key for libserial-dev.

By looking more in detail, this seems completly false. libserial-dev's Debian package is packaging https://github.com/crayzeewulf/libserial (see https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/noble/libserial and https://repology.org/project/libserial/versions), that is not related at all to https://github.com/wjwwood/serial . So the course of action is easier, just package https://github.com/crayzeewulf/libserial .