colcon usage in Robomaker

Question

Hi everyone,  
I am developing on Melodic. This is my first time using the Robomaker and colcon. Coming from catkin, I have a few questions about it:  
  
1) Are we supposed to effectively abandon catkin in Robomaker and use colcon instead for ROS 1 too?  
  
2) What about apt? We use colcon instead of that too? Is that recommended best practices?  
  
3) Is there an equivalent to the catkin_create_pkg? I see  but that seems to be for ROS2 only.  
  
Thank you for your help

Answer

Hi, Welcome!  
1) For building and bundling, yes you need to use colcon build and colcon bundle to create your 'output.tar' files for your robot_ws and simulation_ws. These are used to run your simulation job in RoboMaker.  
2) You can use the 'apt' package manager to install packages, but we recommend using 'rosdep' instead as it will find the necessary packages for you  
3) You can still create packages using the catkin_package_create script as shown here: http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/CreatingPackage You will use colcon after the package is created to build and bundle your packages.

colcon usage in Robomaker

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