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What is part of a distribution is essentially what our distribution.yaml file defines for our build farm:

https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/indigo/distribution.yaml

We can further prune this list using the corresponding release build file:

https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/indigo/release-build.yaml

This is all defined in the REP's 137 (http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0137.html) and 143 (http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0143.html).

Now unless you are going to setup a version of our build farm (there is on going work to make this easier, this is not done yet, see: http://wiki.ros.org/buildfarm#Use_Cases) you'll need to figure out what to build like you said.

One way to do these high level groupings is with metapackages. We do something like this for our "variants":

https://github.com/ros/metapackages

However, for your scenario I would suggest just having all of your packages in one workspace and use catkin build from python-catkin-tools (caveat is that it is not 100% completed, but should work for your use case) or catkin_make_isolated in order to pick and choose what you build and install. You can install different sets of packages into different install spaces and wrap up those install spaces with fpm.

You can look at the documentation for catkin-tools' catkin build command for more details on how to control what to build:

http://catkin-tools.readthedocs.org/en/latest/