Rosdep search

General
1

Greetings fellow roboticists,

if you’re a commendable package creator and always try to specify all your dependencies, you might know the struggle of trying to guess the right dependency key.
Maybe you’re lucky and guess it; otherwise, you have to take the cumbersome route of visiting the rosdep repo and checking the base.yaml for the key for your dependency.

This should really be easier, shouldn’t it?
Well, now it can be!
I’ve added a search command to rosdep in my fork and opened a PR #997.

This command enables you to simply search your rosdep database (which can also include additional sources to the official ones) for the keys matching your search with 1 allowed error (missing, wrong, or extra letter).
It checks both for keys and packages, so you can search for the package name in your Linux distros package manager.

Examples:

$ rosdep search libpcl-dev
Closest keys:
  libfcl-dev

Closest packages:
  libpcl-all-dev: libpcl-dev [debian]
  libpcl-all-dev: libpcl-dev [ubuntu]
  acl: libacl-devel [fedora]
  acl: libacl-devel [rhel]


$ rosdep search pinoccio
Closest keys:
  kinematics_interface_pinocchio
  pinocchio

I hope this will be useful for you and this post helps get the PR some attention so it can be finalized and merged in a timely fashion :innocent:

If it wasn’t useful, here’s a picture to make up for your time:

image
image1024×1024 191 KB

18 Likes
2

OMG, yes, thank you!

3

This is amazing. Thank you for the great work :raising_hands:t4:

4

On the subject of rosdep search, the display and searching of ros dependencies in rosindex was vastly improved in the last few months. Most dependencies now have descriptions which are included in the search.

See System Dependencies

2 Likes
5

Where are these fetched from?