Note on building a single package with catkin_make

[Danealor]

I thought I'd share the small bash script I put together that could build one or more packages at a time instead of all packages with catkin_make. It runs significantly faster (~2s instead of ~10s, probably mostly dependencies), especially when we will have lots more packages in our folder I assume.

1. Make a catkin_make.sh file in ~/catkin_ws
2. Paste the following code into it:

#!/bin/sh
# Arguments with delimiters: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/197792/joining-bash-arguments-into-single-string-with-spaces
# Configure to make specific package(s): https://answers.ros.org/question/54178/how-to-build-just-one-package-using-catkin_make/
old="$IFS"
IFS=';'
str="'$*'"
catkin_make -DCATKIN_WHITELIST_PACKAGES="$str"
IFS=$old

3. Run chmod +x catkin_make.sh to enable execution of the file.

Use as follows, in ~/catkin_ws:

./catkin_make.sh talklisten                    # Make just the "talklisten" package
./catkin_make.sh talklisten turtlebot_fake     # Make both the "talklisten" and "turtlebot_fake" packages
./catkin_make.sh                               # Make all packages (default)

Note that if you go back to using the catkin_make command, it will make only the packages you last told it to with this script (it saves the whitelist). Use ./catkin_make.sh with no arguments to reset it.