Hi,

as a Debian user, I have been trying to use ROS in a Debian box from 
Diamondback. I have had several problems, specially with some software not 
packaged. Now with Fuerte, I have been working in a system to install ROS 
fuerte in a Squeeze box.

The steps in the documentation [1] doesn't work simply because not all needed 
dependencies are available for Squeeze. Another person, have tried to develop, 
something similar [2], but he didn't pass (as I understood) the Layer 2: 
Higher-level robotics libraries and tools step.

Well, my idea has been repackage all possible packages from anywhere (ubuntu, 
testing, univers) to have all the dependencies to compile fuerte in a Squeeze 
box. The job is almost done [3]. Also, there's a debian-robotics.yaml file, 
with all the dependencies that I have found corrected and functional.

Now, if you add this entry [4] to your

 /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d/20-default.list

file, and you add this entry to your sources file:


# Debian Robotics
deb http://sir.upc.es/debian-robotics squeeze-backports main
deb-src http://sir.upc.es/debian-robotics squeeze-backports main

and any backports mirror,

you will be able to do a rosdep install -a in a Debian Squeeze amd64 box, 
having all the dependencies resolved.

However, although I thought that all the job was done I have found that still 
there's a lot of minor problems that makes still difficult to compile ROS in a 
debian Squeeze box.

First of all I have noticed that there are several packages that has a 
dependency a pcl package, when there's no pcl package, but there's a system 
dependency pcl. So, I have to change several manifest files from 

 <depend package="pcl" />

to 
  <rosdep name="pcl" />

Also, I have not be able to found which version of pcl is needed for fuerte 
(1.5, 1.6) With 1.6 it doesn't compile.

Another dependency that have made me problems is opencv. With the version 
downloaded in July, I have been able to compile cv_bridge with opencv 2.3.1, 
however, yesterday, I have not be able to repeat the same step, and I 
suspicious that I need 2.4.

Also, I don't know what to do if I have executed:

rosinstall ~/ros "http://packages.ros.org/cgi-
bin/gen_rosinstall.py?rosdistro=fuerte&variant=desktop-full&overlay=no"

and I would like to update the stacks to see if there's another upgraded 
version with some bug. Exists some kind of rosinstall --update?

So, which versions of libpcl and opencv I need to compile Fuerte? 

Well, just to finish my intention is to publish some kind of instructions to 
use ROS fuerte in a Debian Squeeze, but groovy will arrive and probably my 
work would be unneeded.

Regards,

Leo


[1] http://www.ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Installation/Debian
[2] https://code.ros.org/lurker/message/20120925.031632.cec48145.en.html
[3] http://sir.upc.es/debian-robotics/
[4] http://sir.upc.es/debian-robotics/debian-robotics.yaml

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