Question about new organization of ROS with catkin instead of rosbuild

Question

Hi everyone!!

My name is Ivan. I have worked some years with ROS. But now, I don´t Understand the new organization of package. For example in Fuerte version, we had this arquitecture: example-ros-pkg

- RobotA(Stack)
- Package1
- Package2
- Package3

• RobotB(Stack)
  
  • Package1
    
  • Package2
    
  • Package3
    
• RobotD(Stack)
  .
  .
  .
  
• RobotE(Stack) .
  .
  .
  
  In a Groovy version, the stack concept has been removed, How can reorganize our repository to respect the new standard?

Thanks for your comments!

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Originally posted by Ivan Rojas Jofre on ROS Answers with karma: 70 on 2013-05-08

Post score: 2

Answer 1

The closest equivalent to the old stack concept is the new metapackage, as described here. A metapackage is a package that only contains references to other packages (no code), plus a special <metapackage/> tag. This allows users to install a group of packages using a metapackage, just like they did previously with stacks. Metapackages are also more flexible in that they allow you to group packages that may not be located in the same repository / filesystem.

A suggested layout is shown here for how to organize the metapackage / package hierarchy in groovy:

my_stack/        --> my_metapackage/
  my_package_1/  -->   my_package_1/
    manifest.xml -->     package.xml
  ...
  my_package_n/  -->   my_package_n/
    manifest.xml -->     package.xml
  stack.xml      -->   my_metapackage
                         package.xml (Internally, a tag indicates it's a metapackage)

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Originally posted by Jeremy Zoss with karma: 4976 on 2013-05-08

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 7

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Original comments

Comment by Ivan Rojas Jofre on 2013-05-09:
Thanks a lot for you response Jeremy, Now see clearly the new organization, as I read the documentation and I not understood very well the concept