How to edit/compile ROS source code

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This tutorial tells you how to build as much or as little of ros as you want:

http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installat...

Basically, all the instructions are the same, except you can adjust the rosinstall_generator commands to select different packages to get. I'd recommend checking out the -h of rosinstall_generator because it has lots of options to control where you get the source from (a released version like x.y.z from a tar file vs. the "default" branch from git) and what packages you get.

Also, it's worth noting that you can build packages from source when their dependencies are installed as binaries (see the --exclude RPP option in rosinstall_generator) but any packages you want to use on top of your custom built things will also need to be from source. For example, you cannot build ros_comm from source and the run rviz from binaries and ensure that it is using your version of ros_comm. Instead you need to build rviz (and the dependencies between rviz and ros_comm) from source too.