colocon

This utility configures and uses colcon in a different manner. The default way of working with colcon is having all repositories cloned under a directory with an specific version. This way is not proper if you like to work with Git worktrees as I like. Therefore, I created this utility to make colcon works in another way.

colocon is prepare to work in the following development environment:

• Repositories are located in one or several directories:

repos
|
|__fastcdr
|
|__foonathan_memory_vendor
|
|__fastrtps

• Inside each project there are several directories. Each one is a Git worktree of the repository. Usually at least one should be: master.

repos
|
|__fastcdr
|  |
|  |__master
|  |
|  |__v1.0.11
|
|__foonathan_memory_vendor
|  |
|  |__master
|
|__fastrtps
   |
   |__master
   |
   |__1.9.x

Default configuration

colocon uses the default configuration file ~/.colcon/colocon.yaml to set default options.

{
    "search-paths" : [ "/home/developer/repos" ],
    "compile_commands" : True
}

• search-paths: list of paths where colocon will search the dependencies.
• compile_commands: if True, after calling colcon, colocon will search all compile_commands.json and join them in one compile_commands.json in the working directory.

What colocon does?

colocon searches in the working directory or in the path passed with the argument --project-dir a colcon.pkg file. This file is used to get the project to be compiled and the dependencies. Afterwards colocon searches a repos file using the project's name ({project's name}.repos) and also gets the listed dependencies and their versions. Makes an inner-join between dependencies information of colcon.pkg and {project_name}.repos. colocon will look for the resulted dependencies (and the worktree correspondent to the version) in the search-paths. At the end colocon will call colcon to build the project and all the found dependencies.