Can I use metapackage to define my release list of packages?

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Hi. We have developed lots of different packages in our group. However from these packages, we want to release various "products" as individual debians.

In previous questions I discussed options to generate our own debians outside of the ROS buildfarm. At the end we chose for sake of simplicity to run

catkin_make install

fpm -s dir -t deb

So basically now, what I need is to specify WHICH packages I want to build and install for each release. Since I ship directly the contents of /install I cannot permit catkin_to compile everything in the catkin_ws....

I don't want either to generate a release branch in my SVN in order to maintain a simple process and limit the overhead of our release management process.

So I had in mind to use a catkin metapackage defining the <run_depend> list so that it contains all and only the packages I decide to ship in my release (of course I expect catkin to manage dependencies).

The issue I have is that either

 catkin_make -DCATKIN_WHITELIST_PACKAGES=my_release_metapackage 

or

 catkin_make --pkg my_release_metapackage 

still compile ALL the packages in the catkin_ws... and not ONLY the ones specified in the <run_depend>...

So: 1. Are matapackages the correct way to do what I want?? If so, how should I do it? 2. Is there any other way to just compile and install a specific list of packages??

Thanks