it appears that the kinetic-devel branch has a regression, introduced at commit e0f6397

rostopic echo may not properly return the message data for some topics

this can be reproduced as follows:

• put the latest ros_comm (kinetic-devel branch) in a source overlay workspace (i overlaid this on-top of indigo)
• start roscore in one terminal
• start the sample TF broadcaster node (code below) in another terminal
• run rostopic echo /tf. this will return transforms: None
• spinning up a rosnode (tested via rospy) and subscribing to the topic does indeed result in the expected message data. this is only a problem using rostopic echo on the commandline it seems

repeating the above on a previous commit (i.e. 9ff6955) of ros_comm has no issue and rostopic echo /tf returns the expect result

sample TF broadcaster node:

#!/usr/bin/env python  
import rospy
import tf
import time

if __name__ == '__main__':
    rospy.init_node('test')

    while not rospy.is_shutdown():
        br = tf.TransformBroadcaster()
        br.sendTransform((0, 0, 0),
                         tf.transformations.quaternion_from_euler(0, 0, 0),
                         rospy.Time.now(),
                         'test',
                         "world")
        time.sleep(1)