There is no tool that automates so much of the process, but there is an issue on rosinstall_generator to add an option which would help you do it in a few commands:
opened 05:07PM - 08 Apr 14 UTC
enhancement
Follow up from https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosinstall_generator/pull/2… 1#issuecomment-39870434
I think it would be much better if the `--from-path` option worked more like with rosdep. Currently it simply picks up the package names and checks wheather they are relaeased. However, I think it should not care about the release info of packages picked up via `from-path` and rather read in the info directly from package.xml files. This would make it work with not-released packages.
Consider following these instructions when for one reason or another you cannot use rosdep to install binary packages: http://www2.isr.uc.pt/~embedded/events/HRATC2014/Simulator.html
In particular it seems the suggested `rosdep install --from-paths src -i -y` cannot be replaced with a call to `rosinstall_generator`. Instead, you have to resort to something like `rosdep check --from-paths src -i` and then manually list the missing packages as parameter to rosinstall_generator.
It would be great if the above could be acheived with a command like `rosinstall_generator --rosdistro DISTRO --from-path src --deps --deps-only --exclude RPP` (which currently only works of `src` only contains release versions of packages).
Instead of molding rosinstall_generator into something that covers every use-case of rosdep for from-source setups, would it maybe make sense for rosdep to be able to have rosinstall generating backend?
Basically it would be like “I have some package(s) in this folder, and some things installed from binaries, please get me the list of things that are missing for me to build these package(s) I already have.”
It would be a cool contribution to extend the tool in that direction
.