Why is catkin trying to include a cmake file from a different workspace?

Question

I used to have a catkin workspace called "cepton_ros" that I was doing some development in. Things went sideways so I deleted the whole folder to start afresh from the remote repo.

However, now when I trying building any other workspace with catkin_make, it fails with the following error:

CMake Error at /opt/ros/kinetic/share/catkin/cmake/catkinConfig.cmake:83 (find_package): 
  Could not find a package configuration file provided by "cepton_ros" with                                            
  any of the following names: 
                                                                                                                                                                                                            
    cepton_rosConfig.cmake                                                                                               
    cepton_ros-config.cmake 

  Add the installation prefix of "cepton_ros" to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH or set                                              
  "cepton_ros_DIR" to a directory containing one of the above files.  If                                               
  "cepton_ros" provides a separate development package or SDK, be sure it has                                          
  been installed. 
Call Stack (most recent call first):                                                                                   
  CMakeLists.txt:38 (find_package)                                                                                  

The "cepton_ros" folder no longer exists, and isn't even related to the other workspaces that I'm trying to build. Clearly I have somehow set the base ROS or catkin installation to look for this repository. How did I (likely) manage to do this? And how can I clear the settings to fix the problem?

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Originally posted by M@t on ROS Answers with karma: 2327 on 2020-02-12

Post score: 0

Answer 1

It looks like something is calling the cmake find_package() command and passing in cepton_ros as one of the packages to find. This might be something in your local workspace, or might be something in /opt/ros/kinetic

A grep -r cepton_ros will likely find the offending files. If they're in your local workspace, you'll probably know how to deal with them.

If you find files in /opt/ros/kinetic that are referencing ceptop_ros, they're probably a result of doing a catkin install from the old workspace into /opt/ros/kinetic at some point; and there's a decent chance that there are other references to deleted packages in /opt/ros/kinetic too. If that is the case, I recommend that you remove that directory and any ROS packages that you installed through your package manager and then reinstall ROS.

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Originally posted by ahendrix with karma: 47576 on 2020-02-13

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by M@t on 2020-02-13:
You're right ahendrix, running grep -r cepton_ros in my /opt/ros/kinetic directory identified this file as the culprit:

share/catkin/cmake/toplevel.cmake:  cepton_ros 

Upon viewing the file, it looks like I somehow managed to copy the CMakeLists file from my local cepton_ros workspace to this toplevel file. Obviously this shouldn't be the case! Following the solution given in this ROS Answers issue, I re-installed catkin with

sudo apt-get install --reinstall ros-kinetic-catkin

And this fixed the issue!

Comment by ahendrix on 2020-02-13:
If you managed to overwrite one file in /opt/ros/kinetic, there may be other. Since you installed ROS from apt, you should be able to reinstall all packages with sudo apt-get install --reinstall $(dpkg -l | grep -o 'ros-kinetic-\S*')