Question about new organization of ROS with catkin instead of rosbuild

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The closest equivalent to the old stack concept is the new metapackage, as described here. A metapackage is a package that only contains references to other packages (no code), plus a special <metapackage/> tag. This allows users to install a group of packages using a metapackage, just like they did previously with stacks. Metapackages are also more flexible in that they allow you to group packages that may not be located in the same repository / filesystem.

A suggested layout is shown here for how to organize the metapackage / package hierarchy in groovy:

my_stack/        --> my_metapackage/
  my_package_1/  -->   my_package_1/
    manifest.xml -->     package.xml
  ...
  my_package_n/  -->   my_package_n/
    manifest.xml -->     package.xml
  stack.xml      -->   my_metapackage
                         package.xml (Internally, a tag indicates it's a metapackage)