Create a Deb file from two Ros Packages

edit

Metapackages don't contain any significant contents on their own, they pull in a set of desired packages as dependencies. So in order to easily use metapackages your package A and B debs need to be available in a repository somewhere.

A non-ROS specific way to construct metapackages is described in https://askubuntu.com/questions/33413... It assumes that your package A and B are installable from a repository.

To my knowledge there are not tools in the ROS ecosystem for constructing a single debian binary package from multiple existing binaries.

You can package up multiple packages using ROS bundling https://github.com/mikepurvis/ros-bun...

You can use checkinstall. But it comes with a price. You can combine any number of packages in one Debian archive file. But install macro calls in CMakeLists.txt files must point to an absolute path. If you use catkin variables such as CATKIN_PACKAGE_INCLUDE_DESTINATION or CATKIN_PACKAGE_LIB_DESTINATION, it won't work. Instead, for instance, you should do:

 install(DIRECTORY include/${PROJECT_NAME}/
       DESTINATION /opt/ros/kinetic/include/
 )

After that, executing catkin config --install && checkinstall catkin buildsuffices. When the command finishes, you will see an output of Debian package. When you extract its content with dpkg -x <package_name>, you can actually inspect which folders are archived.