Develop ROS independent library for system dependency resolution

by Nikolaus Demmel for Open Source Robotics Foundation

We propose to implement a library that provides unified resolution of dependencies across platforms (Ubuntu, OS X, ...) and installers (APT, Homebrew, pip, ...). The rosdep tool is currently used for this purpose in the ROS community. We develop an independent library, based on the ideas of rosdep, which can be used to declare and install system dependencies in a platform independent way. The developed library and tools are applicable to ROS and other software alike.