How best to support underlay with colcon within this plugin?

[Levi-Armstrong]

When using catkin_tools you could leverage the catkin config --extend /path/to/devel, but it appears colcon supports this so you have to manually source the workspace in order. Should the build setup support allowing the user to provided multiple paths that get sourced prior to the workspace?

[christian-rauch]

Do you mean colcon does not support workspace chaining via --extend? I actually never used the chaining like this. I always sourced a "base" workspace manually, build the "main" workspace and then use the plugin to developed and recompile.

But it would make a lot of sense to allow the plugin to source these "base" workspaces, before building the "main" workspace. The plugin already does this for the "core" workspace in /opt/ros/, we could extend this by sourcing arbitrary workspace between the "core" and the "main".

[Levi-Armstrong]

Do you mean colcon does not support workspace chaining via --extend?

Yea, it looks like you should do as you explained by sourcing the spaces in order.

But it would make a lot of sense to allow the plugin to source these "base" workspaces, before building the "main" workspace. The plugin already does this for the "core" workspace in /opt/ros/, we could extend this by sourcing arbitrary workspace between the "core" and the "main".

Yea, the build page already has a source button to manually resource and update the environment. A list box could be added where it is automatically populated with the /opt/ros/... and then you can modify the sourcing list which is used. This would also allow for the IDE to be used when developing with the ros bridge where you have to source both ros1 and ros2 workspaces.