How can I ignore some folders in my ROS_PACKAGE_PATH?

I have a folder in which is in my ros workspace which has ~300GB of data spread over many subfolders. And because of this, every single ROS node takes an age to start up (including roscore).

I moved all the data into an external folder not in my ROSPACKAGEPATH and everything started up quickly as before.

Now, I have to decide between changing the way the code works or finding a simple way to ignore packages on my ROSPACKAGEPATH. Is there something similar to a ROS_NOBUILD flag for this?

Asked by ttblue on 2014-01-13 19:41:11 UTC

Comments

Answers

If you are talking about a catkin workspace, you could try to see if creating a CATKIN_IGNORE file in the packages you want to ignore works. Just as ROS_NOBUILD, this is an empty file in the root of the package.

Asked by gvdhoorn on 2014-01-13 20:27:28 UTC

Comments

Unfortunately, I'm still stuck with Fuerte until Jan 30th. I don't want to make any major changes before a big deadline. Any ideas for fuerte?

Asked by ttblue on 2014-01-13 20:50:29 UTC

No, not really. Is it actually necessary for the data to be in your workspace (ie: are they pkgs / nodes)? Otherwise I'd just leave it outside of it. I can imagine the file system crawling to be slow in case there are many (sub)folders.

Asked by gvdhoorn on 2014-01-13 21:15:16 UTC

Well, I think I wrote code in order to easily change the directory to anything I want from variables defined in my shell environment. It took 15 minutes to make the appropriate changes to get this working.

Thanks anyway! I'll keep your answer in mind when I migrate to groovy in Feb.

Asked by ttblue on 2014-01-13 22:35:45 UTC