I am trying to compile enough of ROS to make nodes run on the iPhone. I have followed the directions from the ROSPod page: 

http://www.ros.org/wiki/rospod

These notes have been fantastic. They are slightly out-of-date but gave me pretty much everything I needed to get up to section 2.2.5, ROS.  But here, the advice gets pretty thin and hard to unpack: 

"On the ROS side, I got things working by building them in order (and also only building static libs)". 

What is the order to build? How can I specify that each stack should be built as a static library? What is the minimally sufficient set of things that I need to build to create a C++ node?