All types of dependencies in ROS Fuerte

edit

Hi Benoit, the ros wiki might be a better place for creating such a resource.

I suggest you also follow the ROS buildsystem group

groups.google.com/group/ros-sig-buildsystem

and discuss automation of the build process there.

Note that the fuerte (rosbuild) way of building (and declaring dependencies) will soon be deprecated with the introduction of catkin.

What you really want to ask seems to be: "If I create a ROS package, how can I help users of my package to automatically install all dependencies?"

For this, there are these types of dependencies:

1. Packaged dependencies installable via package managers like apt-get

   1. system libraries available from standard sources
   2. ROS packages available from the ROS repository
   3. Other libraries available from non-standard sources

2. Non-packaged dependencies

   1. software libraries available from other sources, installable via custom methods
   2. ROS packages available from source repositories, installable via custom methods(e.g. rosinstall + rosmake)

Currently rosdep automates the process for 1.1, and roslocate/rosinstall somewhat-automate the process for 2.2

The common way to help user get the dependencies right is to create a readme file and tell the users how to commonly get the dependencies e.g. on Ubuntu. The goal to automate everything is noble, but difficult. With some effort rosdep could maybe be changed to also install 1.2 type dependencies, which you could suggest on the github wiki page or the ROS buildsystem siG.