Hi John,
Sorry, I missed one more flag, --disable-demos should be replaced by --enable-demos in order for drawstuff library to be built. It seems the two error logs you've sent are both failing at finding the drawstuff library, the above change should fix it (but again, you'll have to trigger a re-configure in opende by make clean or equivalent).
-I/home/yoos/devel/ros/stacks/physics_ode/opende/opende/include -DdDOUBLE-Wl,-rpath,/home/yoos/devel/ros/stacks/physics_ode/opende/opende/lib -L/home/yoos/devel/ros/stacks/physics_ode/opende/opende/lib -lode
Also I would like to note that drawstuff is considered to be part of ODE demo and not part of the dynamics engine library, so it's not officially exported into the ODE installation directories. If it's extremely useful, we can consider exporting the c++ flags or simply installing them into the ros install directories (opende/opende/*) by default as well. Please ticket me on it.
As Brian mentioned, there's no plans to customize builds for 3rd party packages under ROS for now. Would it be sufficient to make ODE compile with double precision by default? I've been meaning to switch it over as the gains at keeping things float on most modern computers are less significant. As for drawstuff, if its a dependency of atrias_sim, I can enable the demos build by default as well. Please see changes in r31755. If there are no objections, the changes should be included in the next physics_ode release.