[ros-users] Change in PCL dependency

We have the Hydro release coming up in a few days, and normally I would not
suggest that we make a change so close the the release, but this appears to
be the last opportunity to make this change for a long time.

Currently we release PCL as a ROS package (ros-hydro-pcl), but with no
substantial patches. We would like to instead pull in official pcl-1.7
debians and have everyone install pcl from source or from debs themselves.
This has two benefits, first that we do not have to waste effort releasing
PCL through our infrastructure, and second is that when building ROS from
source you will not need to build PCL in your catkin workspace.

To facilitate this I have created two new rosdep rules:

libpcl-all
libpcl-all-dev

These rules should replace the use of the 'pcl' rosdep rule in your
package.xml's. The common case should look like this:

--- a/package.xml
+++ b/package.xml

- <build_depend>pcl</build_depend>
+ <build_depend>libpcl-all-dev</build_depend>


- <run_depend>pcl</run_depend>
+ <run_depend>libpcl-all</run_depend>

If you directly depend on pcl, then you should update your package and
release it into hydro.

You can raise issues or discuss our efforts to make this change here:

https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/issues/1676

Thanks!

--
William Woodall
ROS Development Team
william@osrfoundation.org
http://williamjwoodall.com/