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The program 'rostopic' is currently not installed. Held broken packages

Hi All,

Using ubuntu 16.04 LTS yesterday I believe the machine did an unattended upgrade. The kernel is 4.15.

Now I can't get rostopic list to work -- and the system seems to be nonfunctional.

user@blah:~$ rostopic list
The program 'rostopic' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt install python-rostopic

If you follow that advice, you get:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 python-rostopic : Depends: python-rosbag but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

If you try to install python-rosbag -- you get another similar message for another package. I've tried sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, and it has not fixed it.

Any ideas about solutions?

Thanks!

Asked by Unproductive on 2018-11-06 00:25:07 UTC

Comments

It looks like you are trying to install the ROS packages from debian upstream instead of a specific version of ROS (see http://wiki.ros.org/UpstreamPackages ). If you were using ROS kinetic, this is probably not what you want.

Asked by ahendrix on 2018-11-06 02:21:02 UTC

Maybe check that /opt/ros/kinetic still exists and that you've sourced /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash in your shell?

Asked by ahendrix on 2018-11-06 02:21:39 UTC

Hi ahendrix, I have same question, but I am pretty sure I am not using upstream version. I manually installed "rostopic" by "sudo apt-get install ros-kinetc-rosbag". I am just wondering why sudo apt install python-rostopic is jump out?

Asked by crazymumu on 2019-11-19 19:34:18 UTC

rostopic is part of the ros-kinetic-rostopic package. If you want to install the version of rostopic for ROS Kinetic, you should do sudo apt install ros-kinetic-rostopic.

Ubuntu has a feature where it tries to suggest a package from the Ubuntu upstream packages when a command is not found. Since the rostopic command cannot be found and since the upstream python-rostopic package includes it, Ubuntu suggests that package. Ubuntu is not aware that the ros-kinetic-rostopic package also includes the rostopic command, so it does not suggest that package.

Asked by ahendrix on 2019-11-19 22:31:07 UTC

Answers