Part of the change was to disable the travis-ci test if Homebrew is not installed (e.g. on Linux) .  I don't think the @patch decorators were available before:  https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosdep/pull/265/files -  so disabling the test was kind of a workaround.  Let me try and get rid of code that disables the test and see what happens on travis-ci.