ROS package managing

I am playing with ROS recently. Actually using it is not hard. But I don’t understand why there is not even a reasonable tutorial regarding package managing. I went through an entire online course not even realizing that managing tools such as wstool and rosinstall_generator exist. (I initially git clone one package at a time into my src folder.)

Long story short. Assuming that you have already created a workspace. To install the package ros_tutorials and its dependency (assuming you are running kinetic),

roscd; cd ..
rosinstall_generator ros_tutorials --rosdistro kinetic --deps --wet-only  > tmp.rosinstall
wstool init -j4 src/ tmp.rosinstall
rosdep check --from-paths . --ignore-src --rosdistro kinetic
catkin_make -j 4

To install additional packages, say tutlebot3_gazebo,

roscd; cd ..
rosinstall_generator turtlebot3_gazebo --rosdistro kinetic --deps --wet-only > kk.rosinstall
wstool merge -t src kk.rosinstall
wstool update -t src
catkin_make -j 4

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