Maintaining a ROS source install (add packages, update release).

edit

Given that you have a base ROS installed, lets say to ~/hydro/install, with the sources in ~/hydro/src, which was generated from a rosinstall_generator command like rosinstall_generator desktop_full --rosdistro hydro --deps --wet-only > hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall. In order to update this install I would do the following:

$ mv hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall.old
$ rosinstall_generator desktop_full --rosdistro hydro --deps --wet-only > hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall
$ diff hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall.old hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall

On my machine I get something like this:

% diff hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall.old hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall
412c412
<     version: release/hydro/orocos_kdl/1.2.0-1
---
>     version: release/hydro/orocos_kdl/1.2.1-0
952c952
<     version: release/hydro/urdf_tutorial/0.2.1-0
---
>     version: release/hydro/urdf_tutorial/0.2.2-0
956c956
<     version: release/hydro/urdfdom/0.2.8-1
---
>     version: release/hydro/urdfdom/0.2.10-3

This tells me that those three packages have new versions, then you can use wstool to update your ~/hydro/src folder:

$ wstool merge -t src hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall

     Change details of element (Use --merge-keep or --merge-replace to change):
  orocos_kdl,  urdf_tutorial,  urdfdom

Continue: (y)es, (n)o, (v)erbosity, (a)dvanced options: y
Config changed, maybe you need run wstool update to update SCM entries.
Overwriting /Users/william/hydro/src/.rosinstall

update complete.

The above command will have updated the .rosinstall file in the ~/hydro/src folder, grep shows me that orocos has indeed been updated:

% cat src/.rosinstall | grep orocos
- git: {local-name: orocos_kdl, uri: 'https://github.com/smits/orocos-kdl-release.git',
    version: release/hydro/orocos_kdl/1.2.1-0}

At this point though, you have not updated the source code you have, to do this you must use wstool again:

% wstool up -t src

The above command will check each entry in the .rosinstall against the thing in the source folder. When it finds an inconsistency, it will ask your what you want to do:

Prepare updating <a href="https://github.com/ros-gbp/catkin-release.git">https://github.com/ros-gbp/catkin-release.git</a> (version release/hydro/catkin/0.5.77-0) to /Users/william/hydro/src/catkin
Url <a href="https://github.com/ros/catkin">https://github.com/ros/catkin</a> does not match <a href="https://github.com/ros-gbp/catkin-release.git">https://github.com/ros-gbp/catkin-release.git</a> requested.
  (d)elete and replace, (a)bort, (b)ackup and replace, (s)kip: s
Skipping install of catkin because: Url <a href="https://github.com/ros/catkin">https://github.com/ros/catkin</a> does not match <a href="https://github.com/ros-gbp/catkin-release.git">https://github.com/ros-gbp/catkin-release.git</a> requested.

I have a custom version of catkin which I do not want to update, so I'll skip that one. Packages which are new will be fetched, I had removed opencv2, so it re-fetched that:

[opencv2] Fetching <a href="https://github.com/ros-gbp/opencv2-release.git">https://github.com/ros-gbp/opencv2-release.git</a> (version release/hydro/opencv2/2.4.6-3) to /Users/william/hydro/src/opencv2

Finally it gets to orocos_kdl and updates it:

[orocos_kdl] Updating /Users/william/hydro/src/orocos_kdl
remote: Counting objects: 227, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100 ...