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Build only modified packages with Colcon, ROS2

asked 2018-07-29 21:04:06 -0500

Marc Testier gravatar image

Hello,

I am using ROS 2 bouncy built from source on Ubuntu 18.04 and I was wondering if there was a command to only build the modified packages with colcon similar to how catkin worked (tell me if I'm wrong ??) on ROS 1 ?

I found the colcon build --packages-select <name-of-pkg> command to only build the selected package and the colcon build --packages-up-to <name-of-pkg> to build the selected package and ALL its dependencies but it will still rebuild things like rclcpp, fastrtps and co...

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Which catkin command are you referring to that you want an equivalent for?

Geoff gravatar image Geoff  ( 2018-07-29 21:10:11 -0500 )edit

Haven't use ros 1 in quite some time, but I remember that catkin_make would just build the modified packages ?

Marc Testier gravatar image Marc Testier  ( 2018-07-29 21:16:34 -0500 )edit

catkin_make is different because it invokes CMake only once and within CMake adds the directory of each package. This approach doesn't scale well since it might have colliding target names across packages as well as each package must declared cross packages dependencies.

Dirk Thomas gravatar image Dirk Thomas  ( 2018-07-29 21:52:20 -0500 )edit

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answered 2018-07-29 21:22:09 -0500

Geoff gravatar image

I'm still relatively new to colcon myself, but as I understand it, it does not know what is inside a package other than what build system it uses, and so has no way to know if a package is modified or not. That is up to each package's own build scripts. If each package can skip its own build if there is nothing to do (as most build systems do), then colcon will merely be calling a build script that does nearly nothing and returns. It's not as fast as colcon doing the skipping, but you shouldn't be seeing packages being actually rebuilt when there is nothing changed.

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Indeed, I can't reproduce it, the command doesn't rebuild all the packages. I must have make a wrong manipulation at one point that made everything rebuild. Thanks for your time.

Marc Testier gravatar image Marc Testier  ( 2018-07-29 21:51:11 -0500 )edit

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Asked: 2018-07-29 21:04:06 -0500

Seen: 8,575 times

Last updated: Jul 29 '18