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This page explains what the ros-testing repository is and how to use it. It used to be known as ros-shadow-fixed.

Overview

Many ROS packages are provided as pre-built binaries for Ubuntu (.deb files). By following official installation tutorial (e.g. for ROS Indigo), you'll get "released" version of binaries. ros-testing is where you can get release candidate versions.

More in-depth description for developers

When catkin packages are released (using bloom), the buildfarm builds them into deb packages which are stored temporarily in the building apt repository. As packages build during the day, an automatic process periodically synchronizes the packages in building to a secondary repository called ros-testing. ros-testing is intended as a soaking area where developers and bleeding-edge users may give the packages extra testing, before they are manually synced into the public ros repository from which users typically install packages.

Approximately every two weeks, the ROS platform manager manually synchronizes the contents of ros-testing into ros (the public repository).

To know which versions of a package are in building, ros-testing (tagged as 'testing'), and ros (tagged as 'main'), consult the status page for your distro/arch.

Usage

If you are a package releaser or otherwise interested in accessing the packages in ros-testing repository, follow the steps to install from the Shadow repository:

1. Make sure that you have a working regular installation.

2. Open (using sudo) the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list file you created during the installation process, and change ros to ros-testing.

   For Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial), this would look like:

   deb http://packages.ros.org/ros-testing/ubuntu xenial main

   The ros line might as well be kept commented. So typically the ros-latest.list should look something like:

   #deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu xenial main
   deb http://packages.ros.org/ros-testing/ubuntu xenial main

   For Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty), this would look like:

   deb http://packages.ros.org/ros-testing/ubuntu trusty main

   The ros line might as well be kept commented. So typically the ros-latest.list should look something like:

   #deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu trusty main
   deb http://packages.ros.org/ros-testing/ubuntu trusty main

   For Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise), this would look like:

   deb http://packages.ros.org/ros-testing/ubuntu precise main

   The ros line might as well be kept commented. So typically the ros-latest.list should look something like:

   #deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu trusty main
   deb http://packages.ros.org/ros-testing/ubuntu precise main

3. When this is done, update your apt index:

   sudo apt-get update

4. If you want to move your entire installation to use shadow versions of packages, you can run sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, but more likely you want to grab just a package or two:

   sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-my-just-released-package

   Note that you can also specify a wildcard, for example, if you want to upgrade all packages relating to a particular platform.

5. Once you're finished testing your package from Shadow, you may switch back to the normal repository by uncommenting the ros line in ros-latest.list, commenting out the ros-testing line, and then updating:

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Thank you for testing pre-release ROS software. As you encounter problems, please contact maintainers using the package issue trackers listed on the wiki pages.