[Fedora Robotics] Installing ROS on Fedora 18, and "the pcl issue" -- is there any hope?

[Rich Mattes]

On 12/03/2012 10:52 AM, Mary Ellen Foster wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Some students have developed some code using ROS that I would like to 
> make use of. The obvious, easy solution is to install Ubuntu on a 
> computer and use it that way, but I've been trying to see how much of 
> a hassle it would be to set things up on my Fedora 18 desktop.
>
> I've had some success following the instructions at 
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Installation/Fedora and making use of 
> the packages from http://rmattes.fedorapeople.org/rospackages/. As far 
> as I can recall -- wasn't taking notes, unfortunately -- the following 
> are the things I had to modify from the instructions given on that page:
>
>   * installed python-rosinstall, python-rospkg and python-rosdep (and
>     ros-release) from the fedorapeople repo instead of using python-pip
>   * downloaded http://ros.org/rosinstalls/fuerte-ros-full.rosinstall
>     and changed the path for actionlib to refer to ros-gbp instead of
>     wg-debs
>   * created an appropriate rosdep-fedora.yaml file as described here
>     (https://code.ros.org/trac/ros/ticket/3929)
>   * edited CMakeCache.txt after running cmake to set
>     SETUPTOOLS_ARG_EXTRA to an empty string before running "make
>     install" (SETUPTOOLS_DEB_LAYOUT seems not to work quite right)
>   * created a symlink dist-packages -> site-packages
>     inside /opt/ros/fuerte/lib/python2.7, again because the deb layout
>     seemed to be getting in the way
>   * added "set (PythonLibs_FIND_VERSION 2)" before all "find_package
>     (PythonLibs)" calls in all CMakeLists.txt files (in the underlay
>     and the actual OS) so that it finds Python 2 instead of Python 3
>   * added "rosbuild_link_boost ($executable system)" to various
>     CMakeLists.txt files -- with Boost 1.50.0, you have to explicitly
>     link against the system lib or else you get undefined references
>     to symbols like '_ZN5boost6system15system_categoryEv'
>
> But now, unfortunately, I've hit "the pcl issue" 
> (http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/robotics/2012/000671.html). 
> The specific symptom is as follows (in the middle of "rosmake -a"):
>
>       [rosbuild] Building package costmap_2d
>       Failed to invoke /opt/ros/fuerte/bin/rospack deps-manifests
>     costmap_2d
>       [rospack] Error: package/stack costmap_2d depends on
>     non-existent package pcl
>
>
> I do have pcl-devel-1.6.0-2.fc18.x86_64 installed but it doesn't seem 
> to help. I tried rebuilding the pcl srpm with the patch from 
> http://dev.pointclouds.org/issues/699 (it applied with minimal fuzz), 
> but the rpmbuild pretty much brought my fairly beefy desktop machine 
> to its knees and I'm not sure if it will help in any case. Should I 
> persevere with that?
>
> Any other suggestions for getting this working? As a fallback, I can 
> just install Ubuntu on our demo laptop, but it would be nice to have 
> this working.
>
> All the best,
>
> MEF
Hi,

After hacking on this issue for a while, the best solution I have found 
is to package the core ros stack (or otherwise have it available,) and 
then build PCL with the issue 699 patch and USE_ROS set to true.

The error you're getting is because PCL doesn't provide any of the ROS 
package metadata out of the box, so rospack fails to find PCL. The patch 
from issue 699 aimed to fix that, and to make PCL play nice with the ROS 
message definitions.  PCL is a beast to build though; there's tons of 
templates which seem to slow gcc down considerably.

I'm pretty sure that the 699 patch +  your best path forward while we 
work on getting ROS packaged up (some of the python tools are already 
packaged, and the fuerte packages on my fedorapeople are almost for 
submission when I find some spare cycles).  I'd be interested in knowing 
if you run into any issues, because the 699 patch is how I plan on 
making PCL work with ROS once the other packages are in Fedora.

Rich
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