PCL RFC 0000: Evolving PCL

Details

• Title: PCL-RFC-0000: Evolving PCL
• Gitter room: PointCloudLibrary/PCL-RFC-00

Introduction

PCL 1.10 is about to be released, and has a massive changelog. With new patches coming in, there have been requests to upgrade PCL's API to make it more developer friendly.

The time of the maintainers is however limited, and as such we need to prioritize the changes, as well as balance the community's expectations of a stable API vs better interface. This document is being created as one place to

• provide an overview to the community of things to come
• provide a central place for maintainers regarding future direction
• provide a starting place for fruitful discussions
• manage the expectations vs reality

Different proposals can have conflicting implementations, conflicting migration paths even though they could co-exist together. Major API breakage needs to be handled carefully.

This document is a living document and will be updated as and when required.

Requests

• Please show support for both how valid/invalid a certain proposal is as well as which "flavor" of the proposal is better
• Please keep the discussions polite and respectful
• Please refrain from asking questions like "how much longer will it take". These are Request For Comments (RFC), and there's no guarantee that they will be implemented

RFC List

Symbol	Explanation
✅	Accepted
❓	Proposed
🚫	Denied

Proposal	Status	Champion
PCL-RFC-0000:-Evolving-PCL (this document)	✅	Community
PCL-RFC-0001:-Merit-in-Old-Ideas	❓	Kunal Tyagi, et al.
PCL-RFC-0002:-Better-type-for-indices	❓	Kunal Tyagi