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Hello,

Let's assume ROS Indigo distro. Let's assume its default location is /opt/ros/indigo. Let's assume I create a new project (package) and I invoke catkin_make install. This will create the folder install in my catkin workspace with the necessary files in it.

Question: Can I copy the files from the install folder to the /opt/ros/indigo and afterwards not use the package from my catkin workspace (i.e. like the ones you install from rosdep)? The folder structure seems almost (if not) identical. Assuming here of course unique package name to avoid overriding.

Please note the question is not why I would do this, but if I can do this. (But maybe since someone might curious, I am considering in creating a .deb file to easily distribute it.)

Thanks!

Originally posted by tanasis on ROS Answers with karma: 97 on 2018-01-02

Post score: 1

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You can (assuming sudo privileges), but it's not a good idea. Future updates to the packages in /opt/ros/indigo as likely to break things, because the dpkg database does not include your added files and will not know how to handle them correctly.

There are excellent tools for creating your own binary packages, which do no suffer from these problems:

Originally posted by joq with karma: 25443 on 2018-01-02

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

Original comments

Comment by tanasis on 2018-01-03:
Initially I thought so too. But then looking inside a .deb file (e.g. apt-get download ros-indigo-pcl-msgs) you will see that it is basically doing the same thing (assuming unique package names). Thanks for pointing to bloom. In my case I need to distribute this internally. Any pointers forthat?

Comment by joq on 2018-01-03:
The easiest path is to use the ROS buildfarm, but that would make your packages visible externally. If that's a problem, then you can run the buildfarm on your own computers. I'd start by contacting the buildfarm mailing list..