Rosbuildbased

Rosbuildbased is a term used in the ROS ecosystem to describe software packages that are built with the rosbuild build system, the original framework used to compile and install ROS components. The label distinguishes these packages from those built with the newer catkin system, which has become the standard for most contemporary ROS development. Rosbuild-based packages are part of the historical ROS 1 software stack and remain encountered in older projects and tutorials.

In rosbuild-based projects, package metadata and dependencies are declared in a manifest.xml file. The build is driven by the rosbuild toolchain, and developers commonly compile with the rosmake command. The resulting binaries and libraries link against core ROS components such as roscpp and rospy. The organization of the code and resources tends to follow conventions established during ROS’s early development, emphasizing straightforward integration with the ROS runtime.

Historical context and migration: Catkin was introduced as the successor to rosbuild to improve integration with CMake and modern tooling. Since the ROS Groovy era and beyond, new packages have generally adopted catkin. Rosbuild-based packages are considered legacy, though many older systems and tutorials describe their setup. Migration to catkin typically involves porting to a catkin workspace, replacing manifest.xml with package.xml and CMakeLists.txt, and adopting catkin’s build and testing workflow.

Current status and usage: While rosbuild-based packages can still be built with older ROS distributions that support rosbuild, ongoing development focus in the ROS community is on catkin-based work. The community provides migration guides and porting tools to assist in converting rosbuild packages to catkin. For new projects, catkin-based development is generally recommended.