[ros-users] best practice to install PCL in ROS

Radu B. Rusu rusu at willowgarage.com
Sun Jul 10 01:50:47 UTC 2011


Ivan,


On 07/08/2011 06:25 PM, Ivan Dryanovski wrote:
>> In addition we've also noticed lately Radu suggesting installing PCL
>> standalone when users reported having problems with PCL in ROS - but
>> that can then not be used in ROS right?
>
> I would be interested in this too. I have been trying to use the
> latest pcl standalone in conjunction with ROS for the last several
> days without success. So far my approach has been to install PCL
> (standalone) from svn, reformat my code so it doesn't depend on
> pcl_ros, remove pcl and pcl_ros from my manifest.xml, and edit my
> CMake file to link against the non-ROS pcl libraries.

That is the correct way. There's only two options:

  * use whatever perception_pcl gives you, in terms of PCL functionality for ROS;

  * remove all occurrences of pcl and pcl_ros from your system and use PCL standalone through CMake mechanisms.

The latter is not normally supported by ROS, but since cmake is a well understood "standard", it shouldn't be difficult 
at all to integrate it, and there's many people in the community that can help you use it.

You have to understand that we cannot have both a "6 months API freeze" (with no new features) and a "living da vida 
loca" in terms of new developments. :) Something's gotta give... Anytime you need something newer than what a ROS 
distribution has to offer, you either start compiling from source the latest and greatest, or you move to an unstable 
ROS distribution altogether. There's nothing in between at the moment, but hopefully things will change in the future.


Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Radu.



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