Why end with many "Abandoned" error lines instead of the actual errors?

I started using catkin_tools recently, and apparently lots of thoughts went in there from a workspace maintainers’ point of view. But when I actually develop code in a non-minimal workspace and something fails to build in the middle of the build process, at the end of the console output I get tons of lines saying

Abandoned <<< XYZ                                 [ Unrelated job failed ]

instead of the actual build errors, or even the name of the failed package. Together with the typical length of C++ error messages this easily exceeds scrollback on my systems and I end up using combinations of catkin build, catkin build >/dev/null, catkin build 2>&1 | less to build my workspace. It would be very nice for usability if at the end of the output (1.) there would the error log of the failed package, possibly only the first few lines, or (2.) a line saying “package xyz failed to build. Look here for the full error log: /logfile”. Another alternative would be to just stop processing after the first error. Of course something like this could be optional.

What would you prefer upstream?

[racko]

You should check out the --summarize option:

  --summarize, --summary, -s
                        Adds a build summary to the end of a build; defaults
                        to on with --continue-on-failure, off otherwise

It can become a bit verbose as well, but it does the part of the trick: It lists failed, successful, ignored and abandoned packages.

[v4hn]

With #734 merged, the biggest chunk of this issue is addressed for me and it’s easy to rerun the build for the failed package once you know its name. It would still be nice to have the build error log for the package printed with the output reporting the failed package name, but I will still close the issue here now.

it would be nice to see a new release that includes this and the other unreleased patches.

Thanks @timonegk ! 🐈