Upgrading catkin to 0.7.16 on ROS Kinetic

Question

I ran into an issue while trying to compile with catkin which was recently solved and merged to the distro's kinetic-devel branch. It is issue #955, which was added to catkin's 0.7.15 release about a week ago, which was followed by 0.7.16 a few days later. As the issue is now solved, I thought that just upgrading the package would let me compile without problem. However, after running

apt-get update

I checked the latest version of ros-kinetic-catkin and got the following

sudo apt-cache policy ros-kinetic-catkin

ros-kinetic-catkin:
  Installed: 0.7.14-0xenial-20180809-132632-0800
  Candidate: 0.7.14-0xenial-20180809-132632-0800
  Version table:
 *** 0.7.14-0xenial-20180809-132632-0800 500
        500 http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

which indicates that the latest version is 0.7.14. However, the ros/catkin api webpage clearly shows "catkin 0.7.16 documentation" on top. I would like to upgrade to version 0.7.16 without compiling from source, so:

• Do I have to make some dependency changes in order to update the package?
• Shouldn't apt-get update && apt-get upgrade ros-kinetic-catkin do it or is there something I'm missing?

As a side note, I'm a bit confused as how the repository and the dependencies relate to each other, so maybe it's just that the dependencies do not point to the latest relase? Correct me if I'm wrong as this is a field I know nothing about...

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Originally posted by jgallostra on ROS Answers with karma: 30 on 2019-03-15

Post score: 0

Answer 1

Both, 0.7.15 and 0.7.16 have only been released into Melodic.

You can check what is currently released into kinetic or melodic. There you'll see that we are currently stil on 0.7.14 for kinetic.

Also note that even though a release has been triggered, it will take until the next sync (announced on discourse) until the debian is available in the regular repos. You could use shadow-fixed for earlier versions. This is what the difference in color is in melodic.

So to answer your question:

1. No, you don't have to change anything for kinetic. You could switch to shadow-fixed to get versions earlier, in general. But this is not working right now, as it hasn't even been released into kinetic.
2. Yes, but only once the new release is synced to the official repo.

What you can do is ask for a release on the catkin repo, but you'd still have to wait for the release to run through, and the sync to happen.

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Originally posted by mgruhler with karma: 12390 on 2019-03-15

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by jgallostra on 2019-03-15:
Ok, then I will build it by myself until it hopefully becomes available. Thanks!