[ros-users] [freebsd] "rostopic echo /tf" does not work?

[Rene Ladan]

Hi,

I ported some other ROS stacks to FreeBSD as well (I'll write a wiki
page soon), including geometry and laser_pipeline.

Running dummy_scan_producer from the laser_assembler package (geometry
1.2.0) works fine but when I want to echo the /tf messages with
"rostopic echo /tf" I get:

acer % rostopic echo /tf
ERROR: Cannot load message class for [tf/tfMessage]. Are your messages
built?

I got it to work once but I forgot how :( (doing some magic with _tf.so
?) . Similarly, roswtf cannot load the tf.tfwtf plugin. The latter seems
to be caused by the __import__ statement on line 68 of
ros/tools/roswtf/src/roswtf/plugins.py (ROS 1.2.4) failing to load the
plugin.

I think it has something to do with the .so files. Currently I install
them as follows:
1. Strip the rpath with chrpath -d
2. Copy the library from its build directory to
/usr/local/ros/stacks/<stack>/<package> with permissions 444 (555 or 777
gives the same result)
3. Make a symbolic link from this library to /usr/local/lib
4. Run ldconfig -m /usr/local/lib to update the library path

ROS_PACKAGE_PATH is set to /usr/local/ros/stacks

Note that I install everything except the "build" directories, but for
tf there are only files under CMakeFiles. Is there some convention in
Python for importing C/C++ modules?

(Note to self: I also found out that the -regextype parameter for
find(1) used by "rosmsg users" does not work on FreeBSD).

Regards,
Rene
-- 
http://www.rene-ladan.nl/

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