Hi,

I've just installed ros from the pre-compiled packages, and I see the 
binary packages depend on a lot of -dev packages, automake, autoconf, 
etc...
Is there a rationale behind that?

I would believe that one of the advantages of pre-compiled binaries is 
that it make it easier to install ros on an embedded system, with 
limited hard-drive/flash space, all of which get lost if the ros 
packages pull close to 1GB of dependencies.

How much community interest would there be behind separating the 
packages into binary and -dev packages, the binary having very limited 
dependencies?

Otherwise, the install from source can be compiled and deployed within 
200MB, incl. roscore (roscpp, rospy), opencv, and image pipeline, laser 
pipeline, laser drivers, but no tf (brings in bullet and a lot of 
friends) and no rviz.

Cheers

-- 
Cedric - Specialising in cat herding
- http://www.asl.ethz.ch/people/cedricp
- http://www.skybotix.com