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rosbuild was the buildsystem of ROS since the early times. It uses CMake but invokes it from a Makefiles and builds each package separately and in-source.

catkin has been introduced in Groovy (in Fuerte only for testing for some packages). It is using CMake more cleanly and only enhances CMake where that falls short on features. It builds packages out-of-source by default, handles dependencies better and does a much better jobs for packaging. The list of advantages is pretty long and you can find more details here: http://wiki.ros.org/catkin/conceptual_overview

While rosbuild can still be used in the future only catkin packages can be released as of Hydro. So if you can choose you might want to go with catkin even if it might take a bit longer to learn the CMake stuff. But whenever you depend on a rosbuild package you are forced to stick to rosbuild.