Say no to catkin_make

catkin is the wrapper around cmake that ROS uses. Majority of the people I know are still using plain catkin_make to build their workspaces but that is pretty basic. Please use catkin, it is much more powerful and convienient.

For one, it can resolve dependencies and parallelize your workspace compilation. When you’re building individual packages it can sometimes be useful as it’ll detect if your dependencies are out of date and compile them too.

Install catkin with

pip install catkin catkin_tools

To initialize a workspace (that already has a src folder)

catkin init
catkin build

Then you can easily set cmake parameters

catkin config --install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_FIND_FRAMEWORK=LAST \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

or

catkin config --install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_FIND_FRAMEWORK=LAST \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=$(python -c "import sys; print sys.prefix")/lib/libpython2.7.dylib \
  -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=$(python -c "import sys; print sys.prefix")/include/python2.7 \
  -DQT_USE_FRAMEWORKS=ON -DCATKIN_ENABLE_TESTING=ON

If you’re using homebrewed libraries on MacOS.

To build a particular package

catkin build pkg

Or blacklist/whitelist with

catkin config (--blacklist|--whitelist) pkg

If you are building an individual package you can force it to build only that package by

catkin build pkg --no-deps

Verbosity and job control

catkin build -v -jN