Consider providing user control of log file base names

[sea-bass]

Feature request

Feature description

I have reported an issue in the ros2cli repo recently (ros2/ros2cli#856) which hopefully will gain traction.

The general idea in the above issue -- and please read that for more details -- is that the default log file names right now are prepended with the executable name (in the C++ case) or the Python executable name (e.g., python3) in the Python case.

The investigation is leading to maybe providing a user-configurable parameter for ros2 run that allows the user to provide their own base name for log files.

Per @fujitatomoya's suggestion, I wanted to open this up here as well to ensure that the launch_ros tools track the above issue and have a way to expose this through ros2 launch, and the launch APIs, as well.

[ros-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on ROS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.ros.org/t/ros-news-for-the-week-march-31st-2025/43015/1

[Tanishq30052002]

@sea-bass @fujitatomoya
I found this issue from open robotics post on linedin, is this issue still needs to be solved? If yes can i take it up?

[fujitatomoya]

@Tanishq30052002 you can take it! thanks!

[kscottz]

@Tanishq30052002 how is it going? Make any progress?

[Tanishq30052002]

@Tanishq30052002 how is it going? Make any progress?

Not yet, I am going through the current code

[Tanishq30052002]

@kscottz @fujitatomoya can you please help me in knowing how to process the args after taking them as input from the args parser?
I have been trying to figure it out but got stuck. Help is appreciated.

[Tanishq30052002]

@fujitatomoya @kscottz
I have implemented the structure such that the user can set the name from the CLI and it will be the final log for the launch file with that name

[Tanishq30052002]

I hope this is the expected output, if I haven't misinterpreted the problem.

[kscottz]

@fujitatomoya can you look at #461?

@Tanishq30052002 protip: if you write closes #<issue number> in your PR it will automatically ping this thread. 😄

I made small suggestion to fix your linter error. You should be able to click the accept suggestion button and run it through CI again.

[fujitatomoya]

@sea-bass #380 (comment) is what you request here, correct? for each executable node, we can use arguments=['--ros-args', ... for launch_ros.actions.Node.