Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Add a guide for those migrating from ROS1 and catkin_tools #101

Open
agyoungs opened this issue Aug 8, 2024 · 0 comments
Open

Add a guide for those migrating from ROS1 and catkin_tools #101

agyoungs opened this issue Aug 8, 2024 · 0 comments

Comments

@agyoungs
Copy link

agyoungs commented Aug 8, 2024

I think it would be pretty useful to have a quick guide that shows users of catkin_tools how to effectively use colcon. A lot of people I've worked with (who are technically strong in ROS1), have echoed the same complaints that "colcon is cumbersome and lacks much of the functionality of catkin_tools".

A deeper dive into this myself has led me to appreciate a lot of what colcon can do, but I still very much feel it is cumbersome compared to catkin_tools. I've only recently learned that many of the things that I want, are likely already implemented in colcon, but it wasn't simple for me to find.

So that led me to open up this issue to create a guide for catkin_tools users. I think a very large portion of ROS1 users would benefit from this guide. Unfortunately, I'm not a colcon power user at this point so I don't think I can write the PR needed for this, but maybe I can define a good list of common catkin_tools use cases.

  • Build anywhere within a colcon workspace
  • Set up build profiles for a workspace (build in Release with Debug info, symlink install, etc.)
  • Clean a workspace/package
  • Change directories to another package
    • This is related to the roscd command and not so much catkin_tools, but I still find it useful here
    • It looks like this exists, but again is a separate install and you have to source the script before you can use it. https://github.com/colcon/colcon-cd
  • I personally really liked the output colored format of catkin_tools. I'm not sure if there's a way to customize that output for colcon in a similar way.

Sorry if this reads as a bunch of feature requests, but ultimately I just want to understand how to do the things I mentioned above the correct way with colcon. I think a guide with examples of each of these items would be extremely useful. I'm willing to write it all up and create a PR if I can get some feedback on the right way to use some of these tools (or pointed to resources that already exist).

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant