Installing recursive dependencies with rosdep?

edit

I've got two catkin packages A and B, and a rosdep key for libfoo. A <depend>s on B. B <depend>s on libfoo. libfoo is not installed. rosdep install A does not attempt to install libfoo. rosdep install B does. Why doesn't rosdep recursively find all of A's dependencies and install them? There's a rosdep argument -n that says to ignore implicit/recursive dependencies, but I'm not using it, so I would expect libfoo to be found. Help?

Versions: rosdep v0.11.5, ROS Hydro, Ubuntu 12.04.5

Edit:

In this case, I haven't built the workspace yet, because I haven't installed all the system build dependencies. So, I've cloned a few repos (including A and B) into a workspace src dir and then I do the following:

ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ws/src:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH rosdep install -i A

So here, B is found in the path and rosdep will not attempt to install B (in Debian form). This is preferred, as I'm actively developing on B. It does not however, attempt to resolve and install B's dependency libfoo.

ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ws/src:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH rosdep install -i B

This does resolve and install B's dependency libfoo.

My problem with "just install all the dependencies for everything in your workspace" is now I have to be very selective about what's in my workspace and how my repos are structured, even though I have the ability to only catkin build a certain package and its dependencies. This is particularly onerous when I have metapackages with both backend and frontend packages in them, and I only want to build the backend (on robot) and frontend (on console). It makes a lot of sense to keep the metapackage together so backend and frontend are tightly coupled... but I don't want to install a bunch of X or Qt dependencies on my robot.

I just want rosdep to do what I believe it's says it does... Without using -n I expect implicit/recursive dependencies to be considered.

In the end, I would love a workflow that looks like this:

source /opt/ros/release/setup.bash
mkdir ~/ws/src
cd ~/ws/src
vcs import < ~/bunch-of-repos.yaml
ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ws/src:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH rosdep install -i on_robot_metapackage
cd ..
catkin config --init
catkin build on_robot_metapackage

And end up with all the system dependencies installed and workspace-resident catkin package dependencies built for my on-robot needs... and a very similar workflow with on_console_metapackage for my on-console needs.

Edit 2:

For metapackages... maybe something like this to rosdep install their dependencies:

# get direct dependencies
grep "exec_depend" ~/ws/src/A/package.xml | \
sed 's|^[[:blank:]]*<exec_depend>\(.*\)</exec_depend>|\1|' | \
ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ws/src:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH xargs -n1 rosdep install -i

# get direct dependencies' dependencies
grep "exec_depend" ~/ws/src/A/package.xml | \
sed 's|^[[:blank:]]*<exec_depend>\(.*\)</exec_depend>|\1|' | \
ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ws/src:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH xargs -n1 rospack depends | \
sort | uniq | \
ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ws/src:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH xargs -n1 rosdep install -i

That seems overly complicated...