Hi Ken, Thibault and everyone else,

our starting point was that recently, many parts of ROS have been
decoupled from the core ROS system. In this sense, rosinstall could be
used as a generic multiple SCM management system. This is exactly what
mr does very well already, so we thought of at least mentioning it as
an alternative.

mr is a mature application that supports many SCMs (subversion, git,
cvs, mercurial, bzr, darcs, fossil, git svn, unison) and is extremely
configurable using shell snippets. It's very well tested and has a
sensible handling for conflicts etc., so even if we don't switch to mr,
it's at least worth having a look at how mr does things.

mr seems to be a functional equivalent of rosinstall; in that sense,
both are orthogonal to rosws to the same extent.

Creating a setup.sh file from the .mrconfig is easy. For demonstration,
we've converted the following rosinstall file:

http://kos.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/uos-public.rosinstall

... into an equivalent mrconfig file:

http://kos.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/uos-public.mrconfig 

You can try it like this:

mr --trust-all bootstrap http://kos.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/uos-public.mrconfig ~/ros
echo "~/ros/.mrconfig" >> ~/.mrtrust

cd ~/ros
mr -p update (, status, ...)

(works both under mr 0.51 and mr 1.06)

Cheers,
Jochen and Martin

-- 
Dipl.-Inf. Martin Günther
Universität Osnabrück
Institut für Informatik
Albrechtstr. 28 (Raum 31/503)
D-49076 Osnabrück

Telefon: +49 (0)541 969 2434

http://www.inf.uos.de/mguenthe/