[Qt-creator] Generating QtCreator cmake project for given CMakeLists.txt from command line

[Nikolaus Demmel]

Hi Tobias,

thanks for your reply.

> do you have an easy to follow guide to set up some demo project for ROS? I
> have been trying to test ROS projects for a while now, but so far failed
> most of the time with setting up everything so that I could build some
> not-too-simple project that I can test Qt Creator and ROS together.

I never used Arch Linux before, but I came up with this tutorial that should get you started with a catkin workspace of 77 ros-core packages from source: https://gist.github.com/NikolausDemmel/aeea157e00b2520aedee

Note that if you just want to test catkin itself, there is actually no need to install all the ROS packages. You just would need a few of the python dependencies, and then create a workspace with catkin and some test packages. But you wanted a not-too-simple setup, so here you go :-).

It is maybe worth reiterating that I am talking about the catkin_tools workflow. There is also catkin_make, which has a different approach in that it adds a top-level CMakeLists.txt to your workspace and builds all packages in one giant CMake project. This makes QtCreator integration easier, since there is just one project to import with one build directory. But the catkin-tools workflow has many advantages and is meant to eventually replace catkin_make as the default workflow: https://github.com/catkin/catkin_tools/issues/90

> I did fix some bugs with ROS and Qt Creator already, but so far have not
> had the opportunity to test the whole workflow myself.

Yeah I noticed things getting smoother over time. Thanks! With 3.6.1 I actually sill have an issue where `include_directories` is not properly propagated to the code-model such that QtCreator does not find include files. This is in conjunction with catkin. But I haven’t had that issue in 4.0 yet, so I stopped to investigate.

Cheers,
Niko

P.S.: For your reference, there seem to also be people wanting a feature like this outside of ROS: http://stackoverflow.com/q/3898763/1813258