Having constant problems with roscd
Every time I restart bash or my computer, there is a good chance I need to screw around with environmental variables for 30 minutes before I can get anything to work. I don't really understand what to do, or how to get the fix to "stick". Is it possible for ROS to just work when I start up bash, or do I need to run source and change ROS_PACKAGE_PATH and ROS_WORKSPACE_PATH every time and mess with setup.bash every time? I feel like I'm accumulating damage every time I'm forced to screw with all of this stuff without really understanding it, just to proceed with the tutorials.
For example, right now I cannot roscd to rospy_tutorials. I can roscd to my own stuff, but not to rospy_tutorials. How can I fix this?
dan@beepboopROS:~/ros_workspace/beginner_tutorials$ roscd rospy_tutorials
roscd: No such package/stack 'rospy_tutorials'
This sounds like something fishy is going on with your workspace: can you tell us how you've created it, which commands you use to source it, etc?
Normal workflow would be to
sourcethe distrosetup.bash, create ws, build it, sourcedevel/setup.bashand you're done. The last bit .... can be added to your
~/.bashrcif you'd like, meaning that every terminal you start automatically has your workspace sourced. But that doesn't scale too well if you have multiple workspaces.