portprefix and build attributes of robot tag of robotinterface XML

[traversaro]

While working on, I noticed a few warnings:

2: [WARNING] Invalid syntax while loading  at line 3 . "robot" element should contain the "build" attribute [unsigned int]. Assuming 0
2: [WARNING] Invalid syntax while loading  at line 3 . "robot" element should contain the "portprefix" attribute. Using "name" attribute

While I could easily silence them by attribute the required attributes, to be honest I am not sure what this attributes are/meant, who they are used and why they should be set.

I tried to inspect the code, but here it is what I found:

• The build attribute seems to never been used (unless I am wrong). In this case, could we remove the warning if it is not set?
• The portprefix is used in

  yarp/src/yarprobotinterface/Module.cpp

  Line 145 in 9b52a71

  setName(mPriv->robot.portprefix().c_str());

  to overwrite the name attribute and it is used to specify the name of the YARP RPC port used to control the yarprobotinterface. However, at this point if this is the role of the portprefix argument, I don't know what is the role of the name attribute. If portprefix is not set, then name seems a perfectly fine fallback, so could it make sense to remove the warning also if the portprefix argument is missing?

[traversaro]

cc @drdanz @randaz81

[traversaro]

I don't know what is the role of the name attribute

Actually the get_name is exposed on the YARP rpc via

yarp/src/yarprobotinterface/yarprobotinterface.thrift

Line 34 in 9b52a71

string get_robot();

, so it may be useful to specify a portprefix different from the name.

[drdanz]

• build: Long time ago, there was a plan to generate these files from some database. The build number was supposed to be increased by one in all files every time the files were re-generated, to avoid mixing files generated by 2 different generations.
  Feel free to remove the warning if not set, but perhaps we should leave the check to ensure that, if set, the number is the same in every file.

• portprefix: I think that long time ago, we considered setting the names of the port using YARP_PORT_PREFIX, or something like that, considering that, instead of opening all devices with --name /icub/right_arm, we could have just passed --name /right_arm and the name would have been added automatically for all ports, reducing the number of errors, and increasing reusability of the files. Again, this was never implemented, so feel free to do whatever you want with it.