[ros-users] Replacement of PIP installed tools with apt based installation

[Jack O'Quin]

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Tully Foote <tfoote at willowgarage.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Last month we ran into some problems when we were using two different
> release mechanisms for installing code. There was a thread on ros-users you
> can find in the archives [1] The primary issue was that some packages were
> coming from apt and some from pip resulting in an apt-get update being able
> to break the working system as the pip based packages would not get updated
> at the same time.
>
> The cleanest solution is to stop using both pip and apt on the same system.
> Thus I announce that all the packages which we were previously recommending
> using pip to install are now available through apt on Ubuntu and using apt
> is the recommended way to install them.
>
> If you have previously installed using pip it is recommended to uninstall
> using pip the tools now available through apt.  I will attach instructions
> for uninstalling these tools below.
>
> These tools include, rospkg, rosdep, rosinstall, vcstools, and rosrelease.
> In apt they are named python-PACKAGENAME, such as python-rospkg.
>
> Tully
>
>
> [1]
> https://code.ros.org/lurker/thread/20120705.075600.163311e9.en.html#i20120705.075600.163311e9
>
>
> Uninstallation Instructions:
>
> If you have pip installed a package you can use pip to uninstall the package
> if you have pip version 1.1 or greater.
>
> sudo pip uninstall PACKAGE_NAME
>
> Caveats, on machines like lucid are that you will have to `pip install pip`
> to get the new version.  Also pip uninstall regularly leaves scripts in
> /usr/local/bin  after uninstalling it is recommended to remove any
> executable from /usr/local/bin starting with ros such as rosws rosco
> rosinstall... If you have installed something else starting with the ros
> name be careful, and possibly leave it alone.
>
> If you are having trouble with any scripts you can type 'which SCRIPTNAME`
> to determine which executable is being run.  If it's in /usr/local/bin you
> are still using the pip based version.  All of the apt based tools will be
> in /usr/bin.

I tried to follow your instructions, but am having some problems. All
the python-* packages installed OK except this one:

$ sudo apt-get install python-rosrelease
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package python-rosrelease

Pip said it uninstalled all the pypi packages, but pip freeze still
mentions vcstools, and rosinstall does not seem to have been cleared
out properly:

$ rosws
ERROR Cannot find rosinstall libraries, check your installation. One
frequent cause is that rosinstall 0.5 is still installed in
/usr/local/lib.
No module named rosinstall.rosws_cli
joq at vision-4:osm_cartography$ which rosws
/usr/bin/rosws

All this just underscores the importance of the new Debian install
recommendation. My system was updated many times using pip and
easy_install and seems to be badly broken at this point. Looks like I
am going to be deleting /usr/local files by hand until something
starts to work again.

-- 
 joq