Support for ROS-Independent builds using ICI and the ROS toolchain

[marip8]

I'm working on a few projects (tesseract, tesseract_planning, descartes_light, etc.) that are independent of ROS but use the ROS dependency management and build tools (i.e. vcstool, rosdep, colcon).

Is it possible to build a ROS-independent project using industrial_ci without sourcing /opt/ros/<distro> (given that all dependencies are system dependencies, not ROS package dependencies) and without referencing a specific ROS distro? If not where would I start looking in this repository to add this capability?

At the end of the day, I'm interested in building/testing these repositories and creating a ROS-independent Docker image from the builds

For reference, I implemented a custom job to do this for the boost_plugin_loader repository. I want to implement the same thing (and with chained workspaces and other industrial_ci features) for the packages mentioned above, but it seems like this custom approach is reinventing industrial_ci to some extent