On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Rosen Diankov <rosen.diankov@gmail.com> wrote:

easy_install has been mentioned several times in this list, and there
are several references to it in ros.org, suggesting that it is
somewhat supported by willow garage. We would like to specify a system
dependency of our ros packages pointing to an easy_install package, is
there a way to do this with the current build system?
thank you,
rosen,

We have talked about adding easy_install as another way to install packages.  It would fall into the rosdep definnitions.  There is a ticket here to add support https://code.ros.org/trac/ros/ticket/2608.  Doing this was too much for the last overhaul of rosdep.  Our hope is to get a more robust rosdep syntax for the next generation. 

Right now we are limited to a single package manager per OS.  But you can define arbitray bash scripts as rosdep targets.  For example log4cxx on hardy in ros/rosdep.yaml in boxturtle.  How to do this is demonstrated in the Tutorials in the rosdep documentation http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosdep