[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] New Software Release - VCI (Version Control Index)

[Daniel Stonier]

Dear ROS community,

**About**

[vci](https://github.com/stonier/vci) is a utility designed to work with @dirk-thomas's [vcstool](https://github.com/dirk-thomas/vcstool) to manage the sprawl of software .rosinstall/.repos links we were having to keep track of for our many workspaces. It does this by providing an interface to interact with an index of url's to .rosinstall/.repos files that can be relative to the index file or existing elsewhere (local machine, network or internet). i.e. no more having to traverse half a dozen web links to some documentation where you could copy/paste the url you'd forgotten or couldn't remember the exact syntax for.

[vcstool](https://github.com/dirk-thomas/vcstool) is wonderfully simple. It does it's job directly with vcs folders and keeps things simple by making available pipes to download tools instead of trying to handle download esoterics itself. This tool also doesn't try and handle the different download esoterics, just the 95% use case pattern we had, which is probably what most people here have - downloading from passwordless github served or local network file served .rosinstall/.repos.

**Installation**

>From pypi or ppa. See the documentation link below.

**Documentation**

* [vci/README.md](https://github.com/stonier/vci/blob/devel/README.md)

**Status**

Not much left to do. If it's useful, I'll see if I can get this moved into the ros apt repo.






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