Contents of this repository was initiated and is currently developed at the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen.

BSD Clause 3
- Copyright DFKI GmbH

Autoproj is a workspace management tool that provides the functionality of WStool/VCSTool and rosdep combined.

Autoproj seperates package and workspace definitions.

Package definitions are stored in a "package set", workspaces in a "buildconf" that is checked out into your workspace in a folder called "autoproj".

• source.yml - Defines the location and type of the source to download (e.g. git, archive, ...) and can add automatically add patches after doenload
• *.autobuild file(s) - Define which packages are available and how autoproj should handle the code (autoproj may generate additional files, like a colcon.pkg file with cmake args). Autoproj can also build workspaces, in the ROS2 case you should still use colcon.
• *.osdeps file(s) - A list of OS dependencies, in this package set, the ros 2 wstool definitions is already imported.

Additional files are for advanced usage (see the autoproj documantation).

A buildconf defines which packages from the package_set are actually installed into the workspace.

It is part of the workspace and thus can easily be shared among a team of developers (e.g. as a git repo).

Is also may contain "overrides" to adapt your checkouts/builds from the defaults in the package_set, this includes switching branches or setting specific cmake args for single libraries and adding patches.

• In the init.rb you define server configurations for source names used in the package set (e.g. "github")
• The overrides.d folder may contain .xml files with changes of location or branches (e.g. when you workspace is using a fork) or add patches to be auto-applied on checkout/update
• The overrides.rb file can change build definitions (e.g. build a scecific file in debug mode)

This decribes installing for the first time, some parts can be omitted for future checkouts

• sudo apt install ruby ruby-dev

• mkdir src

• cd src

• wget http://rock-robotics.org/autoproj_bootstrap

• ruby autoproj_bootstrap git https://github.com/dfki-ric/ros2-buildconf

  • answer the questions, when in doubt hit enter to use the default

• git config --global credential.helper cache

• edit the src/autoproj/manifest file to only include the packages you want in your workspace (remove the ros-2 entry)

• . env.sh

• autoproj update [PACKAGE_TO_INSTALL]

  • answer the questions, when in doubt hit enter to use the default

• cd ..

• sudo apt install python3-colcon-common-extensions if not already installed

• source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash

• colcon build

Sometimes depending packages are not found through pkg-config on first try, in this case: call source install/setup.bash and try colcon build again

You can update autoproj-defined packages in a single command. To do this source the src/env.sh script and call autoproj update when you append a package name or forlder, onthe that package AND its dependencies are updated.

• colcon_import_packages are often using pkg-config to find dependencies. When you get the error message "A required package was not found" when building, run colcon build with --event-handlers console_direct+ in order to see which package is not found

• colcon_import_packages are beneric cmake packages using some automation to be able to be compiled with colcon, as generating package.xml and colcon.pkg files, and generating a .ps file to make pkg-config work, but in some cases, you might need to source install/setup.bash again so colcon can find everything.