vscode-ros: [bug] ROS launch can not load launch file that includes gazebo (program path 'PATH' is missing or invalid)

@KoganOleg Thanks!

@rickstaa For this specific bug, I’m working on a fix to improve detecting of bat/sh/bash/cmd files so that it doesn’t just fail out right. I hope to have that committed in a few days. Once that bug fix is committed, I’ll close this issue. I have a couple of blocking things like this going into the 0.8.0 release.

gzserver and gzclient are shell scripts. Our code detects python, but not shell scripts, so it treats it as a binary program.

I’m going to add some code to detect this case and just launch it.

I’m working on improving support for scripts in the launch path.

@KoganOleg It looks like your ros node is just a shell script, which isn’t a supported target for the vscode ros extension. I would recommend using python instead of a shell script if you are able to.

If you are not able to switch to a python script, you can filter this out in 0.7.0, with something like this:

{
  "name": "ROS: Launch my file",
  "request": "launch",
  "target": "full path to launch file",
  "launch": ["ars540_route_config"],
  "type": "ros"
}

@rickstaa I’m sorry, no, I haven’t worked on this yet. It’s one of the top items I want to fix in 0.7.0.

@ooeygui Ah I see thanks again a lot for looking into this problem!

@ooeygui Ah, I see; I haven’t used this feature since the beginning of May so that the upstream update could have caused the error I’m experiencing. I looked through the vscode-cpp tools issues, but I couldn’t find a related issue. I added a gif of the behaviour I experienced next to the example (reproduction) GitHub. The strange thing is that it complains that the gzserver is not executable while it has the following permissions -rwxr-xr-x`.

For now, I will manually load the gazebo simulator or attach it to a running session. Let me know if I can do something to debug this issue.

Cool, I will leave the closing of the issue to you! Thanks again for your work on the 0.8.0 release.

After looking through this, I decided to add a new feature - https://github.com/ms-iot/vscode-ros/issues/647. This will expose UI for graph control. The ROS Launch debugger can introspect the graph control and launch and attach based on that.

the ROS launch code doesn’t handle sh or bat files, so I’m fixing that as a code filter. the code will just execute it - but not track that execution.

@KoganOleg Can you verify that you are using the 0.7.0 version of the VSCode ROS extension? If so, can you post the contents of your launch.json file?

@ooeygui I verified your solution and it works! Thanks a lot for implementing this. About the “fire and forget”, I noticed that this also occurred before v0.7.0 when you try to attach to a ROS node that is launched by a subprocess Popen call. What I currently do is keep a htop window open to close any dangling processes after the debugger has stopped.

I think for now we can close this issue and create a new issue for the “fire and forget” problem when it is stumbled upon. For me, closing processes through htop is not too bad. I am very happy with the extension being able to debug roslaunch files that contain gazebo again.

@ooeygui Great. I will test it out when I am working on a ROS project!

@rickstaa I appreciate that comment 😃 Thank you!

@ooeygui No problem. I was just curious. Thanks a lot for all the work you do for this extension.

For other people that also experience this issue. You can still debug your scripts using the vscode-ros Attach feature. You can use the code below to wait for the debugger.

Python

# DEBUG: Wait code
import time

dummy = 0
while dummy == 0:
    print("Waiting for debugger")
    time.sleep(1)

C++

  int i = 0;

  while (i == 0) {
    usleep(100000);  // sleep for 0.1 seconds
  }