Robotics - ROS1 Build Systems

catkin make

Catkin make is basically a wrapper of the CMake and make. It’s part of the original Catkin build system, and build the entire workspace using a single Cmake invocation.

• catkin make builds pacakges all together, so there’s less isolation
• Supports parallelism as well, but less fine-grained control over that.
  • catkin_make -j4 launches 4 sub-processes. Relies entirely on cmake parallelism
• Might handle “hidden” dependencies implicitly, whereas catkin build requires more explicit dependency declarations.

Useful Commands

• catkin_make clean: does NOT remove build and devel?

CMakeLists.txt commands

• ros packages should go into find_package( catkin REQUIRED components MY_PACKAGE)

catkin build

catkin build is part of the catkin_tools package.

• It provides more parallelism, and builds packages separately (which provides more isolation)
  • Can support parallelism on the number of both build subprocesses and the number of targets. catkin build -j4 -p2 means “build 2 packages at a time”
• supports build configurations like release vs debug
• only rebuilds packages that have changed, or dependencies that have changed.

Useful Commands

• catkin build --verbose: Verbose Output
• catkin clean: delete build, and devel, logs. This is part of the catkin tools package so it won’t work for catkin make

Differences

• ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}
  • catkin_make treats this as workspace root
  • catkin build finds the package root

General Guidelines

• Avoid putting non-catkin packages under the src directory
  • Adding a package.xml to it will break the SLA to keep the package a non-catkin one, so this is not a good idea
  • A good idea in this case is to install it.
    • If you are using docker without root priviledges, you can’t install it in global space
    • You can install it in a custom space instead.

  • The non-catkin package’s CMakeLists.txt looks like

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    install(TARGETS ${PROJECT_NAME}
        RUNTIME DESTINATION bin
        LIBRARY DESTINATION lib
        ARCHIVE DESTINATION lib
    )
    
    install(DIRECTORY include/ DESTINATION include)
    

  • And it’s invoked by cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${CUSTOM_INSTALL_PATH}
  • See this post on Docker basics for how to set CUSTOM_INSTALL_PATH throught docker

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