Support other ways of selecting packages

[audrow]

Description

It'd be great to give more granular access to building and testing options within Colcon. For example, --packages-above-with-dependencies and --packages-above. These options would be useful in testing something like the ament packages, which you may want to build and test all of the packages above it to see if something broke.

Related Issues

If #808 is implemented, this could make it easier to specify the packages you want to build and test, especially when you're building from source.

Completion Criteria

The ability to specify different ways of building and testing ROS packages. This would probably mirror the options available in Colcon.

Implementation Notes / Suggestions

Here is how package selection is currently done. I think this is a sensible default, but it'd be nice to extend to other options.

action-ros-ci/src/action-ros-ci.ts

Lines 338 to 343 in fc52906

	const buildPackageSelection = packageNames
	? ["--packages-up-to", ...packageNames]
	: [];
	const testPackageSelection = packageNames
	? ["--packages-select", ...packageNames]
	: [];

[christophebedard]

You can remove the package-name: input and specify package-selection options through the colcon-defaults input. You can also specify any other colcon option through that, as long as the action doesn't override the value when it runs colcon build/test .... This is why we added this input. Example:

      colcon-defaults: |
        {
          "build": {
            "cmake-args": [
                "-DMY_CUSTOM_OPTION=ON"
            ],
            "packages-up-to": [
              "pkg_a",
              "pkg_b"
          },
          "test": {
            "packages-select": [
              "pkg_a"
            ]
          }
        }

[audrow]

Oh, that's awesome - thanks for pointing this out!