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

Michael Janssen (CS Grad) mjanssen at cs.umn.edu
Thu Oct 4 10:43:05 UTC 2012


On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 4:23 AM, Tully Foote <tfoote at willowgarage.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 1:50 AM, Leopold Palomo-Avellaneda <leo at alaxarxa.net>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Tully,
>>
>> A Dijous 04 Octubre 2012, Tully Foote va escriure:
>> > Thanks for contributing these resources It will help people looking to
>> > use
>> > debian greatly.
>>
>> I need to make some documentation. I hope soon.
>>
>> > 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.
>>
>> Perfect, my propose is to create some kind of debian-robotics derivative
>> in
>> the way to install easily ros/orocos/ whatever robotics software in a
>> debian
>> distro. I manage a group of boxes in a robotics' lab and it's a pain to
>> maintain ROS in this boxes. It's easy (I doubt it also ...) if you have a
>> ubuntu box and a monouser (or few users) but a multiuser box is ... uff.
>>
>> >
>> > 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.
>>
>> thanks for the explanation. Now it's more clear.
>>
>> > 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.
>>
>> Ok I don't understand this. Are you saying that the repo [1] has a version
>> of
>> the perception package that could compile with a stand-alone version of
>> pcl?
>>
>> Otherwise it's not easy (at least for me) to create a debian (pure Debian,
>> not
>> Ubuntu) package from that sources. It requires the catkin package and by
>> now,
>> waiting the fhs transition it's not easy to prepare.
>
>
> Sorry I pointed to the wrong repo.  This is the repo with the version of pcl
> integrated with ROS which we're using for groovy and fuerte now.  It's
> installs in close to fhs style.  We've generated debian control files for
> ubuntu, but you can use git-buildpackage's command generate-debian for
> generating any of the pure debian codenames as well.
>
> https://github.com/ros-gbp/pcl-release
>
>
>>
>>
>> <rant mode>
>> It's really so complicate to have a full ROS system in a no ubuntu box!!!
>> </rant mode>
>
>
> It's just as complicated on Ubuntu, we've just jumped through the hoops
> already ;-)
>
> Tully

Right now, I'm piggybacking on the packages that are being built for
fuerte / precise, and they are working almost completely out of the
box.  The script that I posted a little big ago[1] is working with
just some version number bumps to download the right python-* packages
at the beginning.  I can get flann, swig-wx, and pcl compiling from
the release repositories mentioned (again, the fuerte precise tags)
with only minor changes (pcl for g++ 4.7 compilation changes, and
swig-wx for autogen updates).  From there right now I'm building the
overlay the "normal" way, but I would love to have an entirely
package-based install with a repository.

Recently I've gotten my rosdep install to run cleanly on Debian by
adding a bunch of new rules in rosdistro, and modifying rosdep and the
targets.yaml to support multiple OSes, using a minor change to
targets.yaml[2] and a couple line change to support the structure
change in rosdep.  So rosdep is looking on debian for the named
gbpdistro packages (ros-fuerte-catkin, ros-fuerte-pcl).

As another user who is trying to understand the hoops that need to be
jumped through, I would love to see a document explaining the whole
process of the build farm how it is set up right now.  So far I have
intuited that bloom does some git magic to make release repositories
(reading the docs of bloom helped a lot with understanding this,
especially [2]), which then get picked up by jenkins and built in a
pbuilder environment.  I haven't quite been able to get the jenkins
job creation scripts working yet, which would help in building the
whole repository on Debian instead.  In theory, Debian should be the
easiest system to get working with packages, next to Ubuntu since it's
so closely related.

[1]: http://code.ros.org/lurker/message/20120925.031632.cec48145.en.html
[2]: https://github.com/jamuraa/rosdistro/blob/debian-with-targets/releases/targets.yaml
[3]: https://github.com/ros/bloom/blob/master/doc/thirdparty.rst

Michael Janssen --- mjanssen at cs.umn.edu
Center for Distributed Robotics --- University of Minnesota



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