Hi ROS community,

lately there has been some discussion on improving rosinstall. I would
propose to something completely different and replace it with mr [1]. It
serves as a common interface to most VCS, is easy extendible and
included in Debian and Ubuntu since ages.

mr provides ways to clone multiple repositories into a defined directory
layout as well as updating all repos and buffering commits. For
conversion, we could convert rosinstall files into mrconfig files quite
easy or even add support for them as an extension.

The only drawback is, that it's written in perl, which is available in
Apple and most Linux by default but not on Windows (but the same goes
for rosinstall with python).

Comments, ideas and implementations welcome.

Cheers,

Martin and Jochen

[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/mr/