Packages ignored. What package and why?

[roman-tub]

Hi guys,
this might be stupid, but I spent quite a while trying to find the information I'm looking for.
Maybe this is a feature request or maybe I'm just not seeing the obvious.

System Info

• Operating System: Ubuntu 4.15.0-46-generic
• Python Version: Python 2.7.15rc1
• Version of catkin_tools: catkin_tools 0.4.4
• ROS Distro: melodic

Build / Run Issue

• Works with catkin_make
• Works with catkin_make_isolated --merge
• Works with catkin build
• Works with catkin build -p1
• I did not read this

Expected Behavior

I just want to know which package was ignored and why.

Actual Behavior

Steps to Reproduce the Issue

Whitelist and blacklist are None.

VERBOSE=1 catkin build -p1 -v | grep -i ignor

gives:

[build] Ignored: 1 packages were skipped or are blacklisted. 

[mikepurvis]

Show the packages in your workspace, and diff that against what's in the build list:

catkin list
ls build

I agree that the UI could be better here as far as having an option to show the ignored packages, or at least output the list of them to a file (for those of us who have hundreds of packages in our workspaces).

What you may be hitting is that I think catkin_tools treats metapackages as "skipped" in the sense that it considers them for dependency information but doesn't actually invoke anything for them at build time— their package.xml files don't get installed, so they don't actually appear at all in the final installspace (yes, this behaviour is probably a bug, see #418, #366).

[roman-tub]

Thanks for your answer!

I just found out, that there is an option for catkin build , which gives the info:

--summarize, --summary, -s
                        Adds a build summary to the end of a build; defaults
                        to on with --continue-on-failure, off otherwise

[roman-tub]

And yes you were right. The ignored package is a metapackage.
And yes I agree. This behaviour is confusing and probably a bug.