how to use rosdep to install ros packages with apt
Recently, one of the developers in the team created a new package that depends on package sound_play. I guess he installed ros-fuerte-audio-common on his system. When I pulled his package and built it, I got an error that the package was not found, and it took me some time to find which debian package I had to install in order to get that ros package.
The problem, is that when we setup our system on a new platform (i.e. an intern's laptop), it becomes tedious to install all the packages. Well I could create a setup script and maintain it, but that's not ideal.
Since we are using rosdep to install all the rosdep dependencies, I was wondering if there was a way for rosdep to take care of this problem.
A solution would be to add a rosdep to ros-fuerte-audio-common in the manifest of the package that depends on package sound-play, but I think that's not appropriate. I've never seen it in 3rd party packages that I've looked at, and then there would be too many rosdeps for all the ros packages available as debian packages...
Another solution is to apt-get install ros-fuerte-* ...
Ideally, we would only have to apt-get install the core ros packages and the python-rosdep package, then type rosdep install mypackages, and we would be all set.
PS: I am under fuerte and Ubuntu 12.04
Are you talking apt or are you talking rosdep? Because for apt you have to declare dependencies in the package source, so rosdep has nothing to do. As for rosdep I never understood quite how it works (never really worked for me) and if they want to use it in the newer distros or drop it.
I am talking about using rosdep to install ros debian packages with apt. I am not building any debian package myself. rosdep works quite well otherwise, we maintain our own yaml file and I wrote a script to set up rosdep properly (our yaml file has to be referenced in /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d)