Revision history [back]

I only need the description from one of the arms and a specific gripper.

You'll need to make sure to not remove any part of the repository you cloned which is used by the package(s) you are interested in, but other than that you should be able to either:

remove the directories containing the packages you're not interested in, or
place a CATKIN_IGNORE file in those directories

Both will cause the packages to no longer be built, nor found by any ROS tool. Not even in the src space of your workspace.

I only need the description from one of the arms and a specific gripper.

You'll need to make sure to not remove any part of the repository you cloned which is used by the package(s) you are interested in, but other than that you should be able to either:

remove the directories containing the packages you're not interested in, or
place a CATKIN_IGNORE file in those directories

Both will cause the packages to no longer be built, nor found by any ROS tool. Not even in the src space of your workspace.

And a quick comment:

These two packages I am installing them from source into my catkin workspace. But, these packages are very wide in the sense that I only need the description from one of the arms and a specific gripper

where you write "package", you most of the time seem to actually be referring to the repository. Repositories contain packages. A collection of packages is not also called "a package".