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

[Mary Ellen Foster]

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

-- 
Mary Ellen Foster -- http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~mef3/
Interaction Lab -- http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/InteractionLab
School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University

Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered under charity
number SC000278
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