Hi Jochen and Martin,

just giving more facts:

Since it seems mr does not have a website, only a manpage, here is a link to an online version of it:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/natty/man1/mr.1.html

The choice of perl may offer more problems than just portability, such as finding
people to fix bugs or extend the code.

I also do not quite like the choice of an INI file variant for the mr config files,
containing arbitrary shell commands.

The natty variant seems to install mr_0.51 (though I am not sure), which by
default trusts other mr files (and the arbitrary commands therein), oneiric
has the newer version which does not.

Either way however is useless for using mr in scripts, which can call mr with
the option to trust anything.

I agree to Ken that it is unclear whether the benefits of switching would outweight the effort.

The part of rosintall generating setup files is not really that huge, so it
should be rather easy to combine that with mr. So a quick hack of
mr-rosinstall should not take too long, should anyone feel like it.

cheers,
  Thibault



On 11/18/2011 06:00 PM, Jochen Sprickerhof wrote: 
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/
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