How does ros execute my nodes on a remote machine?

edit

1) ROS assumes that you have your workspace set up on machine B. The remote launch syntax allows you to specify an environment-loader script on the remote machine, which is responsible for sourcing the appropriate setup files to set up your ROS environment on the remote machine. ROS does not transfer any code or binaries to the remote machine.

2) If there is an older version of the node on machine B, it will run the older version.

3) I'm not quite sure I understand what you're proposing.

In short: roslaunch does not copy anything to the remote machine when doing remote launches. It assumes you're keeping your code in sync outside of roslaunch.

I've seen teams and projects do this in two ways:

• Assuming all of your machines have the same architecture (i386, x86_64, ARM, etc), you can put the shared code onto a shared file server, and run it directly from the file server.
• Keep code in sync manually, and build on each machine

It sounds like you have a more complex use case than most other users. It may be worth writing some of your own tools and releasing them for the rest of the community once you have something that works well.