Update documentation about expectations for GIDs

[jacobperron]

Replaces https://github.com/ros2/rmw/pull/329 Follow-up to https://github.com/ros2/rmw/pull/328

---

This PR contains two changes:

• Use gid struct for request id Everywhere else in rmw, we use the type rmw_gid_t for global identifiers. For example, rmw_get_gid_for_publisher and rmw_get_gid_for_client. Furthermore, other global identifiers have a maximum size of 24 bytes, not 16 bytes. Changing the type and name of the client id in the rmw_request_id_t struct makes it consistent with other parts of the rmw API.

• Update documented expectations for GIDs

  • Clarify that GIDs are globally unique within a ROS domain and consistent between processes/hosts.
  • Specify that any unused bytes in the GID should be set to zero (e.g. in cases where not all 24 bytes are used). This allows application code to directly compare GIDs without having to ask the middleware.

The latter change is especially useful for the proposed service introspection feature. E.g. if tooling wants to compare 24 byte GIDs, we want to ensure that any unused bytes are not set to garbage values and that they are consistent between processes and hosts.

If these changes are acceptable, I'll proceed in making the necessary changes to rmw implementations to:

• Update any references to "writer_guid" to use the new "client_gid.data" member.
• Ensure that they set unused bytes in the GID to zeros

[jacobperron]

For context, for DDS implementation the DDS-RTPS spec describes a GUID as being 16 octets and globally unique within a domain.

From section 8.2.1.2:

Type used to hold globally-unique RTPS-entity identifiers. These are identifiers used to uniquely refer to each RTPS Entity in the system. Must be possible to represent using 16 octets. The following values are reserved by the protocol: GUID_UNKNOWN

Specifically, for a DDS-Entity, from 8.2.4 The RTPS Entity:

Globally and uniquely identifies the RTPS Entity within the DDS domain

I think these align well with documentation changes proposed in this PR. But, please let me know if you think these expectations may be problematic.

[christophebedard]

But, please let me know if you think these expectations may be problematic.

This means that https://github.com/ros2/rmw_cyclonedds/issues/377 will have to be fixed (which I am totally in favour of, of course).

[clalancette]

CI:

• Linux
• Linux-aarch64
• Windows

[clalancette]

One of the failing tests on Windows is a known flake. The other one is new to me, but I honestly don't see how this PR could possibly have caused it, given that these are documentation updates only. So I'm going to go ahead and merge this anyway.