tools: Add rosinstall / vcstool file generator

[jbohren]

Make it so it's easy to create a "shopping cart" of ros packages and generate a .rosinstall file

[dlaz]

+1!

[jbohren]

@dlaz I'd say #84 will need to happen before this does. As it stands, rosindex can't discern between ros package dependencies and rosdep dependencies.

[dlaz]

That makes sense, though even a tool to generate a rosinstall for just the selected packages and not their deps would be useful.

[jbohren]

That makes sense, though even a tool to generate a rosinstall for just the selected packages and not their deps would be useful.

Yeah, it's also a matter of priorities. The idea for the vcstool file generator would basically just be a javascript that lives on each page and adds the vcs info to a cookie. Then you could click a generate button which would create the yaml for you in a popup modal like: http://getbootstrap.com/javascript/#modals-examples

[jbohren]

@dlaz Ugh man the rosdep format is impossible to parse without prior knowledge of distro versions and package managers (see versions E and F which are indistinguishable): https://gist.github.com/jbohren/cb4e083b033ab841d511

[dlaz]

That certainly makes things harder. A few comments (not sure how much they help):

• Both E and F only seem to appear in the language-specific rosdep files (python/ruby)
• The set of package managers is is much smaller than the set of distro versions, so maintaining that list for disambiguation would be the easier route

[jbohren]

It's alright, I'll just add a platform/version tree and a list of managers in the config file, and just iterate through them. It's not worth doing anything fancy.

[jbohren]

@dlaz http://rosindex.github.io/deps/