.catkin file and symlinked home dir

[hershwg]

I am frequently having this problem where my devel/.catkin file gets to looking like this:

/u/hersh/ros_workspace/src;/wg/stor2a/hersh/ros_workspace/src

but

hersh@spf$ ls -l /u/hersh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Sep 13  2010 /u/hersh -> /wg/stor2a/hersh

So /u/hersh is a symlink to /wg/stor2a/hersh.

Sometimes catkin thinks I am working from one side of the symlink and sometimes it thinks I'm working from the other side.

I wouldn't care except I get errors like this:

multiple files named [something.launch] in package [something]:
- /u/hersh/ros_workspace/src/something/something.launch
- /wg/stor2a/hersh/ros_workspace/src/something/something.launch

So clearly roslaunch could be changed to notice that they are the same file, but the more root-cause way would be to change whatever writes into .catkin and have that do the checking. Looks to me like the catkin cmake files are what writes into devel/.catkin.

Any time I get the above error I fix it by removing one of the entries from the .catkin file, but it took a long time to find that the .catkin file was the source of the problem. Removing it every time doesn't seem like a proper fix either.

Thanks

[dirk-thomas]

Can you please describe the steps when both of these folders are getting added? It sounds like it does not happen always.

[hershwg]

I've tried to reproduce it in an example catkin workspace but it doesn't seem to happen. In my big actual workspace it happens a few times per day, and generally seems to happen after a "catkin_make" or after a "cd build; make".

I have also noticed that after doing a catkin_make and source-ing the setup.bash and doing "roscd something", it takes me to /wg/stor2a/hersh/ros_workspace/src/something, which is the "real" location instead of /u/hersh/..., which is what $HOME is set to. I've tried running make and catkin_make from both sides of the symlink in the toy version, but it doesn't seem to be causing the problem.

[dirk-thomas]

As far as I can see from the code catkin_make always uses the os.path.abspath which mean the "real" path.

The only way I could think of would be if you invoked plain cmake. Therefore you would have needed to call it with -DCATKIN_DEVEL_PREFIX=path/to/devel. Could that be what you have done before?

[hershwg]

This did indeed fix my problem. Thanks for the great service! :)