rosinstall-0.5.16-py2.6.egg

While attempting to install ROS on a MacBookPro, I ran into the following issue:

...

File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/rosinstall-0.5.16-py2.6.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/rosinstall", line 115, in install

error_message = "Failed to detect %s presence at %s."%(self.vcsc.type, self.path)

AttributeError: VCSClient instance has no attribute 'type'

(Detailed explanation of error at: https://code.ros.org/trac/ros/ticket/3393.)

There's a ticket on ros.org, and several comments pointing out that the issue is "that using vcsc.type isn't supposed to work." and that "Instead calling get_vcs_type_name() fixes it."

So I thought to myself, "Great! It's a known error, I'll just change the line and run it again." Not so. It turns out that the file we need is inside the file /2.6/site-packages/rosinstall-0.5.16-py2.6.egg. After some reading, I found out what a .egg file was (like a jar file, but for python) and I unzipped it. There I found the offending file, and changed it.

At this point, however, the issue was egg-ing it back up again. More reading showed that I needed a setup.py file to make an egg, and that was nowhere to be found. After much googling, I found a similar setup.py file from rosinstall that wasn't actually meant to be an egg file, but something similar and I altered it a little bit.

Still no dice. Eventually, what I ended up doing was downloading the source code, changing the line, and hacking together a setup.py in order to create a new rosinstall-0.5.16-py2.6.egg.

If anyone else ever runs into this problem again, they should be able to just replace the current /2.6/site-packages/rosinstall-0.5.16-py2.6.egg with this one.

TL;DR: Download to http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~lfrazier/projects/rosinstall-0.5.16-py2.6.egg if you can't install ROS on a Mac due to the type/get_vcs_type_name() issue.