On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Brian Gerkey <gerkey@willowgarage.com> wrote:
> It seems like, to record the software that makes up your experimental
> environment, you need to know:
>  * the versions of all released stacks in use
>  * the svn/git/bzr/hg URI and revision/branch/hash info for everything else.
> (To be complete, you could record the version of the Linux kernel and
> so on, but we have to bottom out somewhere.)  So perhaps we need a
> tool that gathers that information....

A tool like that would be very helpful, I think that's an excellent idea

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Tully Foote <tfoote@willowgarage.com> wrote:
> Ivan,
> What version of git are you using?  Are you on a version of Ubuntu I could
> test?  I'm on lucid 64.

Updating to the latest git resolved the issue. Thank you for pointing
that out and testing the install yourself!

***

Onto some further issues. I hope I'm not becoming burdensome with
these; I really support the idea of downloadable and reproducible
experiments, which is why I want to understand how to streamline the
process. Here are step-by-step details of what I did (I'm running on
Ubuntu 9.04)

1) I generate a rosconfig file like this:

./unwrap_externals.py
https://code.ros.org/svn/wg-ros-pkg/externals/distro/cturtle/all/ >
ICRA2011_Dryanovski_Morris_Xiao.rosconfig

I added the following lines to the file:

- git:
    uri: http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu/git/ccny-ros-exp.git
    version: master
    local-name: ccny-ros-exp
- git:
    uri: http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu/git/ccny-ros-pkg.git
    version: ICRA2011
    local-name: ccny-ros-pkg
- svn:
    uri: https://code.ros.org/svn/ros/stacks/ros/tags/cturtle@11463
    local-name: ros

I am attaching the config file I used to this email.

1) I attempted to reproduce the instructions found here:
[http://www.ros.org/wiki/Papers/ICRA2011_Dryanovski_Morris_Xiao] on a
machine that did not (and never had) a ROS installation. I execute
this command:

rosinstall ~/icra2011_ccny
'http://www.ros.org/wiki/Papers/ICRA2011_Dryanovski_Morris_Xiao?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=ICRA2011_Dryanovski_Morris_Xiao.rosconfig'

The .svn and .git repos download smoothly. However, when the installer
attempts to do "rosmake rostest", I get the following error:

"rospack failed to build"

2) Next, I deleted the ~/icra2011_ccny directory and followed the
instructions here
[http://www.ros.org/wiki/cturtle/Installation/Ubuntu] to install
ros-cturtle-ros from binaries. The installation and rosmake step
finished successfully.

3) I uninstalled the ros-cturtle-ros package, and re-ran

rosinstall ~/icra2011_ccny
'http://www.ros.org/wiki/Papers/ICRA2011_Dryanovski_Morris_Xiao?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=ICRA2011_Dryanovski_Morris_Xiao.rosconfig'

This time, the installation finished cleanly.

So in summary, it appears that the rosinstall tool with the paper
.config fails if ROS has never been properly installed on the system.
Is this because my .rosconfig file is missing something, or does the
problem lie somewhere else? Perhaps there was dependency I was missing
before I requested  the ros-cturtle-ros binaries?

Thanks,

Ivan Dryanovski