[ros-users] Compiling and installing ROS in Debian Squeeze

Thu Oct 4 04:53:07 UTC 2012

Hi Leo,

Thanks for contributing these resources It will help people looking to use
debian greatly.

If you'd like we could also work with you to try to merge debian support
upstream.  Our whole infrastructure could be extended to support debian
codenames as well as ubuntu ones. We don't have time to actively support
Debian releases but patches in that direction would be accepted.  Related
to this we could consider providing your backports in the main ROS repos as
we do for Ubuntu.

Jack's spot on with respect to PCL.  The problem is that PCL standalone
defines symbols which collide with the ROS messages.  This is an artifact
of the early development process, and can't be fixed without an api
breaking change on either side.  To build the same version as in ROS see
this repository [1] It is a git-buildpackage repository with all the tags
generated for Ubuntu, and can easily be extended for other debian codenames
into sourcedebs.

Tully

[1] https://github.com/wg-debs/perception_pcl-release

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 9:48 AM, Jack O'Quin <jack.oquin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 9:49 AM, Leopold Palomo-Avellaneda
> <leo at alaxarxa.net> wrote:
> > A Dimecres 03 Octubre 2012, Rich Mattes va escriure:
> >> On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 6:18 PM, Leopold Palomo Avellaneda
> >> <leo at alaxarxa.net>wrote:
> >>
> >> > Hi,
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > 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.
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> >> We had a lot of fun trying to figure this out in Fedora[1] as well.  As
> it
> >> turns out, you can't use the upstream PCL release for Fuerte, you need a
> >> custom branch of PCL hosted on github[2] which contains extra message
> >> definitions and stack metadata.  I raised the issue upstream[3] and it
> >> looks like we have to wait for PCL 2.0 for ROS to build against PCL as a
> >> stand-alone library instead of requiring that PCL be modified.  We're
> going
> >> to try to patch Fedora's system PCL to make it a hybrid ROS stack and
> >> stand-alone library so that ROS is usable until this situation is
> resolved.
> >> It seems this issue is pretty[4] common[5].
> >
> > Well, we want something similar. A PCL version stand-alone that could be
> used
> > by ros.
> >
> > I have seen the github code, and it doesn't seems that use the ROS stuff,
> > although is required by cmake. From a ROS full installation (188)
> packages I
> > have compiled 106, considering that pcl is not built or installed.
> >
> > I hope to have something functional some day ...
>
> So do I.
>
> Many people have stumbled over this problem in Fuerte. And, I fear it
> may not get better in Groovy. I really hope I end up being wrong about
> that.
>
> I think PCL must have fallen in the cracks during the Fuerte release.
> Many of us expected catkin to solve the problem of building
> stand-alone PCL with the ROS message tools. That only half worked.
> Thanks to catkin, PCL can now optionally be built to use standard ROS
> messages, such as sensor_msgs/PointCloud2. But unfortunately, PCL also
> defines several ROS messages of its own: ModelCoefficients,
> PointIndices, PolygonMesh, and Vertices, which cannot reasonably be
> handled by the stand-alone PCL build. The changes to the PCL 1.5
> sources were too large, messy and complex to merge into their
> stand-alone tree.
>
> To ship a working Ubuntu version for Fuerte, the wg-debs/pcl github
> project was created. Unfortunately, the main purpose of wg-debs is to
> add the Debian rules and source control for several Ubuntu packages
> hosted on packages.ros.org because they are necessary rosdep
> dependencies. Getting that to work for PCL involved significant
> additional source changes, mostly defining those additional messages
> and using them in PCL.
>
> That mostly solved the problem for Ubuntu systems. But, it leaves no
> good solution for other Linux distros, Mac OSX, ARM boards, other
> embedded systems, or anyone wanting to build everything from source.
>
> When PCL 2.0 comes out, it will only use PCL-defined types, no ROS
> messages. So, these problems should eventually go away. Until then,
> the ROS community needs to provide a PCL 1.x version that can be built
> and installed from source on any of our target platforms. Then, the
> Ubuntu Debian packages should be built from that. Unfortunately, that
> will demand considerable maintenance effort including documentation,
> with active Q&A support both here and on the PCL forums.
>
> Perhaps there is some clever way to repackage those additional ROS
> messages into a catkin ROS package that a stand-alone PCL could
> optionally build with, as it already does with std_msgs and
> sensor_msgs when USE_ROS is specified for building. But, that seems to
> be beyond my current catkin and PCL skills.
> --
>  joq
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> ros-users at code.ros.org
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>

-- 
Tully Foote
tfoote at willowgarage.com
(650) 475-2827
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