catkin build does not follow symlinks properly

[hgaiser]

I am working on OSX with ROS, but some packages can't compile there due to drivers that aren't available. For that reason, I am also using ubuntu in a virtual machine. To reduce duplication, I symbolically linked the src folder from OSX to the ubuntu guest machine. In that way, source code is the same in OSX and in ubuntu but both OS's have their own build and devel folder. Running catkin build in ubuntu somewhere inside the symlinked folder will try to erroneously use the build/devel from OSX, which is incompatible with the ubuntu version and will fail.

Long story short: running catkin build in /home/hgaiser/catkin_ws/src<symlinked>/some_package (where src is a symlink to /media/psf/Home/catkin_ws/src) is equal to cd /media/psf/Home/catkin_ws && catkin build, which doesn't work.

[wjwwood]

Is this a duplicate of #91?

[jbohren]

@wjwwood I don't think this is an exact duplicate of #91 but it is related.

@hgaiser For now if you want to build from within your symlinked source tree after already sourcing your environment, you can run:

catkin build -w  ${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH%%:*}

[jbohren]

@hgaiser Take a look at #186

[rukie]

Can someone elaborate on how to resolve this? I also am running a guest Ubuntu Virtual Machine that symbolically links to a host windows machine.
Running the following command doesn't seem to make a difference.

catkin build -w ${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH%%:*}