Use pydantic instead of basic_type_check about rosbridge_suite

[sea-bass]

@EzraBrooks is also active, and I can almost guarantee he and I would both be very much pro type hints! See b434598 for example.

[EzraBrooks]

I'd be happy to help review a PR for this. The serialization and deserialization in this package is pretty hard for me to wrap my head around - especially where there's special cases for certain types, which exist in a few places - and it would be great to have static type checking to help trace through it.

[yoelbassin]

@sea-bass would love to hear your opinion about this one before I start refactoring stuff locally :)
BTW are there any other active maintainers?

[yoelbassin]

especially where there's special cases for certain types, which exist in a few places

Could you mention some of the places you've seen this, so I would skim through them? :)

[yoelbassin]

Well, after playing with it a little I found the pydantic version that rosdep supports is at most 1.10 which is a little outdated. The newest pip version is 2.6 where breaking changes were introduced since the 1.* versions.

I'm not sure what approach I should take, either implementing a simpler version of pydantic on dataclass (which really isn't ideal), or using the older pydantic version.

What do you think would be the better approach?

[EzraBrooks]

here's one such odd place, where the library implicitly converts uint8[] to a base64 string. This one in particular actually bit me recently on a project.

rosbridge_suite/rosbridge_library/src/rosbridge_library/internal/message_conversion.py

Line 203 in 7d78af1

# Special case for uint8[], we encode the string

[EzraBrooks]

It looks like Pydantic is at version 1.10 even on Ubuntu Noble, which releases this month (April 2024), so it seems we should target the older version.