Based on colcon/colcon-core#111.

I am trying to use a colcon.meta file and I require to pass a flag to several of my packages. It is the same flag for a subset of my packages.
Is there any chance to have the ability to use a regular expression pattern either in the place of a name or a different mode: "pattern"?

{
    "names":{
        ".*_no_shared":{
            "cmake-args":[
                "-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF",
            ]
        }
}

{
    "pattern":{
        ".*_no_shared":{
            "cmake-args":[
                "-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF",
            ]
        }
}

Is there anything in colcon that covers my requirement?
I would be happy to help with this with a PR.

Hi, I would like to know which is the default behavior when multiple .meta files are used when calling the build. For example if I call colcon build --metas conf1.meta conf2.meta with the following files:

conf1.meta

{
    "names": {
        "package1": {
            "cmake-args": [
                "-DOPTION_1=1",
                "-DOPTION_2=2",
                "-DOPTION_3=3",
            ]
        }
    }
}

conf2.meta

{
    "names": {
        "package1": {
            "cmake-args": [
                "-DOPTION_2=22",
                "-DOPTION_4=4",
            ]
        }
    }
}

Are all the options being merged and duplicated ones being overwritted with order-based priority?

Thanks

Hello,

I'm trying to create a colcon.pkg file to give default command line arguments to my package. I saw this issue: colcon/colcon-core#111 but I still have some problems. I want to specify that my launch package use the option --symlink-install. When I do colcon build --symlink-install, I get effectively symlink on my package. When i try to put it in my colcon.pkg to affect only this package and not whole workspace, this option seems to be ignored

My colcon.pkg file:

{
  "symlink-install": true,
}

Can you help me find what I do wrong ?
Thanks !

Good morning,

I would like to contribute with a suggestions that I (and many of my colleagues) think that it would be an incredibly useful feature (and not very hard to implement).

Current behaviour

colcon.meta allows to set names and paths to find ONE packages and add compilation flags to it.

New desired behaviour

Allow to set compilation flags for many packages at the same time, by using a wildcard, regex or a new parameter in json file to specify which ones.

Example

Current:

{
  "names":
  {
    "package1":
    {
      "cmake-args":
      [
        "-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug"
      ]
    },
    "package2":
    {
      "cmake-args":
      [
        "-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Desired:

{
  "names":
  {
    "package*":
    {
      "cmake-args":
      [
        "-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Users can add metadata repositories via commandline but currently cannot remove them and have to go remove / edit the metadata_repositories.yaml by hand

Context

I've downloaded Eigen 3.3

eigen: { type: 'git', url: 'https://gitlab.com/libeigen/eigen.git', version: '3.3' }

into the source workspace alongside other ament packages. Colcon discovers the package and can compile it, but it needs to be inserted into the colcon build graph so that it gets built prior to packages that depend on it (e.g. sophus). These packages use the eigen key for discover, but colcon, by default, discovers Eigen3 as the key since that is the cmake name of the project. Hence, need to remap the name.

What Works

Using a colcon.pkg file, with remapped name (and incidentally, some cmake args to customise the build).

name: "eigen"
type: cmake
"cmake-args":
  - "-DBUILD_TESTING=OFF"
  - "-DEIGEN_TEST_NOQT=ON"

What doesn't work

Using a colcon.meta file placed one down from the src directory (default lookup point). Colcon does detect this (I can introduce a parsing error failure by putting incorrect syntax into the file), even applies the cmake-args if I use Eigen3 as the name, but it doesn't remap the name with:

names:
    "Eigen3":
        name: "eigen"
        type: cmake
        "cmake-args":
            - "-DBUILD_TESTING=OFF"
            - "-DEIGEN_TEST_NOQT=ON"

Note, using paths (i.e. src/eigen) does not work either.