> A robot is made of dozen, if not hundreds of packages. catkin compiles the whole workspace [...] s/robot/software Why even have the concept of a `workspace`

> A robot is made of dozen, if not hundreds of packages. catkin compiles the whole workspace [...] s/robot/software Why even have the concept of a `workspace`? I don't think it solves any problem. Most bigger software projects are built on-top of other software, but most deal with it without having to implement their own build system. I know that CMake is established software, but despite its own horrendous scripting language I find it mostly useful if you want to build cross-platform native software - if you're going to run on Linux anyway, I think there is no point for this indirection. > - Make and autotools (Haha) ? You might laugh about these tools, but they build most of your userspace if you're on Linux. And yes they even work on distributions other than Ubuntu.