If i currently have kinetic instead of indigo, and i have to install a package that was design for indigo, (ros-indigo-image-pipeline) how do i check that i can replace indigo with kinetic or if it is even available for kinetic?

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First a quick answer: I've used Kinetic with a Jackal running Indigo many times and have run into very few issues. image_pipeline is certainly released on Kinetic and can be installed using sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-image-pipeline. You likely already have this package installed.

A good question is how to check what packages are released for a particular distro (allowing installation from apt-get)? You could:

1. Check using apt-cache on your machine (e.g. apt-cache search image-pipeline)
2. Check the wiki. Note every package page has status indicators at the top highlighting if a package has been released or not. Notice the green "Released button" on the image_pipeline page when you select Kinetic?
3. There are also several tools online for checking build status. These are likely less useful if you are not a package maintainer, but if you are trying to track down an issue it's good to know these exist. http://build.ros.org/ and http://repositories.ros.org/status_pa... could both be useful.

If a particular package you need to use isn't released on your target ROS distro, you can always try building from source by obtaining a copy of the source (typically a git clone will do this), and putting it into catkin workspace and trying to build. The multitude of issues that can arise when building from source is a whole other can of worms.