The vcstools module provides a Python API for interacting with different version control systems (VCS/SCMs).

See http://www.ros.org/doc/independent/api/vcstools/html/

Install the latest release on Ubuntu using apt-get:

$ sudo apt-get install vcstools

On other Systems, use the pypi package:

$ pip install vcstools

When testing or doing development on vcstools, use a virtualenv:

$ virtualenv ~/vcstools_venv
$ source ~/vcstools_venv/bin/activate
$ pip install --editable /path/to/vcstools_source

At this point in any shell where you run source ~/vcstools_venv/bin/activate, you can use vcstools and evny edits to files in the vcstools source will take effect immediately. This is the effect of pip install --editable, see pip install --help.

To setup a virtualenv for Python3 simply do this (from a clean terminal):

$ virtualenv --python=python3 ~/vcstools_venv_py3
$ source ~/vcstools_venv_py3

When you're done developing, you can exit any shells where you did source .../bin/activate and delete the virtualenv folder, e.g. ~/vcstools_venv.

Use the python library nose to test:

$ python setup.py test

To test with coverage, make sure to have python-coverage installed and run:

$ python setup.py test -n  # this installs test dependencies only
$ nosetests --with-coverage --cover-package vcstools

To run python3 compatibility tests, run:

$ python3 setup.py test