Checkout of packages into a catkin workspace

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rosinstall needs to be called with --catkin if you do not want it to generate those files.

Another option is to use wstool, which is a refactoring of rosws for catkin workspaces.

http://wiki.ros.org/wstool

You can do a lot of things with wstool, like having it fetch your .rosinstall file's contents:

$ mkdir -p ~/my_ws
$ cd ~/my_ws
$ wstool init src /path/to/my.rosinstall -j8

This will fetch all the entries in the my.rosinstall file into the src folder and it will fetch up to 8 (-j8) in parallel.

Then you can just run catkin_make:

$ catkin_make

You can also use wstool to modify your "workspace", using it's other verbs:

$ wstool set -t src my_serial --git <a href="https://github.com/wjwwood/serial.git">https://github.com/wjwwood/serial.git</a> -v 1.1.6
$ wstool update -t src

This will add the git repo, at the specified version, to the workspace with a target folder in the workspace of my_serial. The update command will actually fetch the code. Notice that you must always specify the target workspace after the verb with -t src.

Hope that helps.