As we have shown earlier, metapackages are special packages with only one file inside; this file is package.xml. This package does not have other files, such as code, includes, and so on.

Metapackages are used to refer to others packages that are normally grouped following a feature-like functionality, for example, navigation stack, ros_tutorials, and so on.

You can convert your stacks and packages from ROS Fuerte to Kinetic and catkin using certain rules for migration. These rules can be found at http://wiki.ros.org/catkin/migrating_from_rosbuild.

In the following screenshot, you can see the content from the package.xml file in the ros_tutorials metapackage. You can see the <export> tag and the<run_depend> tag. These are necessary in the package manifest, which is also shown in the following screenshot:

If you want to locate the ros_tutorials metapackage, you can use the following command:

    $ rosstack find ros_tutorials  

The output will be a path, such as /opt/ros/kinetic/share/ros_tutorials.

To see the code inside, you can use the following command line:

    $ vim /opt/ros/kinetic/ros_tutorials/package.xml  

Remember that Kinetic uses metapackages, not stacks, but the rosstack find command-line tool is also capable of finding metapackages.