rosco: checkout source code for ROS resources

rosco is instead motivated by “give me the source, now.” In exchange for this haste, it does not do any bookkeeping or environment configuration for you: it is tries to be equivalent to running svn co, git clone, or the like.

rosinstall is a useful tool for managing a consistent development tree of multiple ROS stacks. It takes care of important environment configuration, tree updates, and more. It is less useful in situations where you just want to quickly get the source for a particular stack or package as it does more than just retrieve code.

For example, you want to add a stack to an existing checkout, you may have to:

  1. Lookup the rosinstall entry for the package/stack using roslocate.
  2. Update your rosinstall configuration with this information.
  3. Run rosinstall, which will iterate through all entries in the rosinstall configuration.

If you have multiple entries in the rosinstall configuration, you will have to wait as rosinstall examines each entry for updates.

The roslocate script was suggested in [REP115].

Usage

The rosco command is roughly equivalent to running the equivalent svn, git, or other source control tool to “checkout” or “clone” a repository. It does not record any additional state.

rosco <package-or-stack>

Searches for the specified ROS package or stack and retrieves the source code use the appropriate version control tool. For example, if the source code is stored in a Subversion repository, rosco will run a svn checkout of the resource in the local directory.

rosco –rosinstall <rosinstall-file>, rosco -r <rosinstall-file>

For each entry in the rosinstall file, retrieve the source code use the appropriate version control tool. Unlike rosinstall, it only retrieves the source code and nothing more.

piped input

rosco also accepts piped input formatted as rosinstall entries. This is primarily meant to be used in combination with roslocate.

Example:

$ roslocate info rospy | rosco

–distro=DISTRO_NAME

Checkout the source code for a particular ROS distribution release, e.g. rosco rospy --distro=electric will checkout the Electric release of rospy. This option is not valid when used with --rosinstall.

–dev

The --dev option causes rosco to checkout the development branch instead. It should be specified in combination with a --distro=DISTRO_NAME option as development branches are distribution specific.

See also

[REP115]rosco and roslocate tools for rosinstall (http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0115.html)