The vcstools module provides a Python API for interacting with different version control systems (VCS/SCMs) It is used in tools like wstool and rosinstall, which are frequently used in ROS.

This should not be confused with vcstool (no trailing s), which provides the vcs command line tool and is otherwise unrelated to this repository, see: https://github.com/dirk-thomas/vcstool

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

See documentation

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