Hi all,

the new rosinstall 0.6 series also has an implementation of REP110
(http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0110.html).
I attach to this announcement an updated version of REP110 (Ken, please
update).
I am not sure what next step will be required to close the REP as final,
if the next step in the formal process is a review, then I hereby declare
the REP to be ready for review.

Summary:
REP110 suggests a new command-line tool called rosws that does what
rosinstall does, with a more SCM like syntax. This should on the one hand
benefit novice users who feel uncertain about rosinstall, but can also
benefit expert users who felt that rosinstall does too much with a single
command.

rosws uses the same functions and back-end as rosinstall, it is just a
different ui to the same tool. Therefore there are no incompatibilities
between both tools. However it is an ongoing attempt to make rosinstall
more independent of ROS, and rosws will allow to create workspaces that do
not have a ROS root. The rosinstall command remains unchanged except for
the addition of an option to run SCM actions in parallel.

Users will get the rosws script if they update rosinstall using pip

$ sudo pip install -U rosinstall

There is also tab completion for bash that went into a python package of
its own (this one does not install with easy_install):

$ sudo pip install -U rosinstall_shellcompletion

Documentation and a tutorial for rosws are here:

http://www.ros.org/doc/api/rosinstall/html/

So if you got curious go ahead and try it out.

Also I made some design decisions on usability (with much help from Tully
and Ken), but I can well have misjudged, and I am happy to modify details
based on user feedback.

regards,
  Thibault