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If you are developing under ROS Groovy or newer, the idea of a "stack" has been replaced by the idea of a "metapackage". See Metapackages and the Elimination of Stacks

Metapackages are essentially "empty" packages that group related packages together through runtime dependencies (<run_depends>)

You will want to learn more about catkin (the preferred build system in groovy and newer): http://ros.org/wiki/catkin

In particular, here is some info about metapackages: http://ros.org/wiki/catkin/package.xml#Metapackages

And here is an example of a metapackage: https://github.com/roadnarrows-robotics/hekateros/tree/master/hekateros