When working with ROS source code, it is often useful to do so in a "workspace". For the following ROS tutorials you will need an area for working on tutorials and creating new ROS stacks and packages.

rosws is a tool that provides a uniform interface to various version control systems such as SVN, Git and Mercurial and for managing all packages installed in a ROS overlay. An extensive tutorial on rosws can be found here.

Creating a new workspace

The following command creates a new workspace in ~/fuerte_workspace which extends the set of packages installed in /opt/ros/fuerte:

rosws init ~/fuerte_workspace /opt/ros/fuerte

Note: rosws is part of the rosinstall package, which is not installed by default. The following command downloads it using the Ubuntu package manager:

sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall

Creating a sandbox directory for new packages

New packages need to be put in a path that is in the variable ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. All directories that are managed by rosws, i.e. that have been added using rosws are automatically added to the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH when the file setup.bash of the corresponding workspace is sourced. Although new packages should always be put in repositories that have been installed using rosws, it can be very convenient to have a sandbox directory where for instance packages created during the tutorials can be put without requiring any additional rosws commands. For that we create a new directory sandbox and add it to the hidden .rosinstall file with rosws:

mkdir ~/fuerte_workspace/sandbox
rosws set ~/fuerte_workspace/sandbox

Every time the entries in the workspace change, it is necessary to re-source ~/fuerte_workspace/setup.bash to make sure that the updated ROS_PACKAGE_PATH is used.

source ~/fuerte_workspace/setup.bash

It is very common to replace the line source /opt/ros/fuerte/setup.bash to source the setup.bash in ~/fuerte_workspace or whichever workspace you use most often.

A more complete ROS Workspace tutorial can be found here.

Confirmation

To confirm that your package path has been set, echo the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH variable.

$ echo $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH

You should see something similar to:

/home/your_user_name/fuerte_workspace/sandbox:/opt/ros/fuerte/share:/opt/ros/fuerte/stacks