We use ROS 2 at my company to develop robotic applications. From time to time, we have the need to remove everything and do a fresh build (for mostly CI reasons).
Does the community feel the need to add an extra verb to the colcon tool, something akin to colcon clean? I take inspiration from make, where we would write a rule to clean the build directory.
Since this issue is related to the colcon tool, and not ROS 2 in general, the mods may move it to a more appropriate place if they so desire. I want to know two things:
Do you think this idea has merit to be put into colcon?
What other “features” have you hacked along that you use daily in your development?
It could very well be the case that a lot of people have thought about this, and maybe this already exists in colcon. If that is the case, I would love to be educated on it.
Author of colcon-clean here, glad to see the extension fulfilling it’s niche. If you’d like to checkout another case example, this ROSCon talk presents it in more detail, as well as its integration into Nav2’s CI:
Another colcon extension I wrote is for caching workspace artifacts, to save valuable or costly CI time when building or testing. This is also presented in the same talk liked above, with the repo currently found here:
Example demo using both colcon cache & clean together: