Reproducing regression tests on your machine

When you get a build failure on a distro or architecture that is different from your own machine, you can easily create a chroot environment where you can reproduce the build failures:

• First download the chroot script that will do all the dirty work for you:

   wget https://code.ros.org/svn/ros/stacks/ros_release/trunk/hudson/scripts/devel_run_chroot.py
   chmod +x devel_run_chroot.py

• Then create the environment you want. Just replace lucid with any Ubuntu distro, and arch with either i386 or amd64:

   mkdir tmp
   ./devel_run_chroot.py --interactive --workspace tmp --distro lucid --arch i386 

Now just be patient, this can take a couple of minutes. Once it's finished, you'll get a pop-up root terminal in your new environment. In that environment you can just install the packages you want to test (e.g. apt-get install ros-cturtle-pr2all), and start reproducing!