Elevator pitch for vcstool alternative

ROS Projects
1

It is quite common to handle ROS 2 package dependencies through the use of .repos files and vcs. After several years of using vcs, I have encountered several issues and quirk behaviors with it that motivated me to create an alternative CLI tool. Here I am introducing ripvcs (following the naming scheme of ripgrep). It is a CLI tool written in Go that offers improvement both in speed as well a set of new features.

Highlights

  • Faster operations for commands shared with vcs
  • Recursive import: Automatically import other .repos files within the cloned repositories
  • Repositories sync: Stash and pull any changes in any repositories found in given path.
  • Nested repository pull: Pull changes even within nested repositories.

I invite you to try ripvcs out and provide feedback on any issues you encounter to improve the performance and reliability of it.

3 Likes
2

Wow, this looks good! We use our custom wrapper around wstool that added the recursive option. Your tool looks great and I’d give it a try. But there are a few features I’m missing:

  • Support for .rosinstall files in addition to .repos
  • Possibility to specify a different folder for the recursively imported repositories (so that you can have one workspace with just the top-level repos and another workspace with their dependencies).
  • Support for proxy remotes (this is basically a temporary remote that is tried instead of e.g. github.com)
    • We use this in case we go to a field experiment and we expect that Internet will be inaccessible in that place. Before we go, we pull all repos on a central server we take with us and other computers should temporarily use this remote instead of github/gitlab.
    • This task cannot be easily done by setting a HTTP proxy, as git pulls are over HTTPS or SSH and we can’t (unfortunately) fake github’s host keys.
    • Alternatively, instead of this quite nonstandard feature, ripvcs could just support specifying the name of a remote used for pull/sync. We could then manually add the temporary remote using git remote add and just tell ripvcs to pull from this one.
2 Likes
3

Thanks for feedback!

I’ll look into the points you raised and provide a solution for them.

4

What do .rosinstall files offer extra to .repos files?

5

Nothing, but they exist, and converting them all to .repos is quite some churn and would be unnecessary if the tool supported them.

6

Yes, as @gavanderhoorn said, they offer nothing in addition to .repos. But sometimes we don’t even control the source of the files as they’re a part of a 3rd party package.

8

Having it as an apt package might be nice. I think an apt-get command communicates better for installations instructions than wgetting a binary blob.