The 'roslocate' command is currently broken

[Pi Robot]

Folks,

Following some recent ROS updates, it appears that the 'roslocate' command no longer works properly.  In section 5.3 of the book (Installing the Pi Robot URDF Files), the roslocate command is used to install the Pi Robot description files.  To get around the bug in the roslocate command, use the following commands instead:

$ cd ~/ros_workspace

$ svn co http://pi-robot-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pi_robot_description

$ cd pi_robot_description

$ rosmake

$ rospack profile

Section 4.14.2 which describes the roslocate command itself also won't do you much good at the moment.  Not sure when the core ROS folks will get a chance to fix this...

--patrick

[Pi Robot]

Looks like the problem is that the 'roslocate' command now defaults to the ROS Groovy index.  So if a package has not been indexed for Groovy on the ROS wiki, it will not be found.  The work around is to use the --distro option to look for the package in an earlier ROS release.  For example, if you use roslocate without the --distro argument to find the mjpeg_server package, it will fail:

$ roslocate uri mjpeg_server

 error contacting http://ros.org/doc/api/mjpeg_server/stack.yaml:

HTTP Error 404: Not Found

This is because the maintainers of the mjpeg_server package have not yet submitted an index request for Groovy.  To look for it in the Fuerte release, use the command:

$ roslocate uri --distro fuerte mjpeg_server

http://svn.code.sf.net/p/bosch-ros-pkg/code/trunk/stacks/mjpeg_server

and we get back the source location.

--patrick