1) eliminate methods no longer return a shared pointer. Shared pointers are good for Factors and Conditionals (which are also non-copyable), because these are often passed around under the hood. However, a BayesNet is simple a list of shared pointers and hence does not cost a lot to return as an object (which is compiler-optimized anyway: there is no copy). So, the signature of all eliminate methods changed to simply return a BayesNet<> object (not a shared pointer).
2) GaussianBayesNet::optimize is now replaced by optimize(GaussianBayesNet) and returns a VectorConfig and not a shared pointer
3) GaussianBayesNet and SymbolicBayesNet are now simply typedefs, not derived classes. This is desirable because the BayesTree class uses templated methods that return BayesNet<Conditional>, not a specific BayesNet derived class.
This simplifies Bayes nets quite a bit. Also created a Conditional base class, derived classes ConditionalGaussian and SymbolicConditional
Finally, some changes were needed because I moved some headers to .cpp
* Factors are now templated on the configuration type. Factor Graphs are now templated on the factor type and configuration type.
* LinearFactor is a factor on an FGConfig.
* LinearFactorGraph uses LinearFactor and FGConfig.
* NonLinearFactor is still templated on Config.
* NonLinearFactorGraph uses NonLinearFactors, but is still templated on Config.
* Tests and VSLAMFactor have been updated to reflect those changes.
(1) FactorGraph and NonlinearOptimizer now no longer have a .cpp file, but a -inl.h file as in [http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml Google's C++ Style Guide]. This means if you expect to instantiate one of the functions in a cpp file, you have to include the -inl.h file.
(1) getOrdering is now in FactorGraph, and the non-linear version does *not* take a config anymore.
Long version: I made this change because colamd works on the graph structure alone, and should not depend on the type of graph. Instead, because getOrdering happened to implemented in LinearFactorGraph first, the non-linear version converted to a linear factor graph (at the cost of an unnecessary linearization), and then threw all that away to call colamd. To implement this in a key-neutral way (a hidden agenda), i had to modify the keys_ type to a list, so a lot of changes resulted from that.
Richard Roberts
Frank Dellaert
Chris Beall
Alex Cunningham
Manohar Paluri