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I was able to install this, and I don't know if it's going to work like I'm expecting but I now have libfreenect and the ros freenect_launch and other freenect_node stuff all installed in Melodic on Ubuntu18.04, per the commands below:

Compile/install libfreenect from source, NOT an apt install of libfreenect-dev (if you installed that via apt it shouldn't hurt, it just won't work. No need to remove that apt package afaik):

cd  ~    
git clone https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect.git    
cd libfreenect    
mkdir build   
cd build    
cmake -L ..    
make
sudo make install

Then, cd into your catkin workspace source, (I'm assuming yours is "~/catkin_workspace/src" but you may need to change that if yours is different). Clone the repo, then cd up one directory back into your catkin workspace root, and run catkin_make:

cd ~/catkin_workspace/src
git clone https://github.com/ros-drivers/freenect_stack.git
cd ..
catkin_make

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04 running ROS Melodic, and was able to get this installed the day of this post (July20-22, 2019).

Whoever is running this repo really should just update the package to make it installable via apt, it already appears to work with Melodic, it's just grief for us noobs..

(just kidding, I appreciate the work that's been put into this; without it my $8 Xbox 360 Kinect from a thrift store wouldn't be of any use to me. Would really like to help make this easier to install on Melodic, but the repo looks so dead I don't even want to put in a pull request..)

Let me know if you run into problems with this; I haven't tested it at all but it DOES install.

It's still a very useful tool you know? What's 2019 if you can't build robots of doom out of scrap consumer electronics?..