rospack cannot find package made by cmake even after sourcing

asked 2017-01-02 06:12:43 -0600

Pouya
23 ●6 ●6 ●10

Hello all.

I am trying to run some of rviz tutorials at ros-visualization. In particular I am interested in "visualization_marker_tutorials". What I did, since I am more comfortable with cmake, was to:

cd visualization_marker_tutorials
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

It compiled without any issue and now I have a devel directory in my build folder:

$ tree devel
devel/
├── env.sh
├── lib
│   ├── pkgconfig
│   │   └── visualization_marker_tutorials.pc
│   └── visualization_marker_tutorials
│       ├── basic_shapes
│       └── points_and_lines
├── setup.bash
├── setup.sh
├── _setup_util.py
├── setup.zsh
└── share
    └── visualization_marker_tutorials
        └── cmake
            ├── visualization_marker_tutorialsConfig.cmake
            └── visualization_marker_tutorialsConfig-version.cmake

Here is the problem. I did source devel/setup.bash and it sets $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH to the root of build directory. Now when I do rosrun using_markers points_and_lines I have the error of rospack complaining it cannot find these packages. What is my mistake here? Is it due to the fact that I am not using catking build system? If so, is there a way to build generic ros packages with cmake?

answered 2017-01-02 07:09:17 -0600

gvdhoorn
86574 ●283 ●1432 ●1054 http://cor.tudelft.nl/

updated 2017-01-02 07:19:02 -0600

Here is the problem. I did source devel/setup.bash and it sets $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH to the root of build directory. Now when I do rosrun using_markers points_and_lines I have the error of rospack complaining it cannot find these packages. [..]

This is only a partial answer, but the reason is most likely the fact that rospack will only consider directories 'packages' if there is a package.xml in them. In your tree output, I don't see a manifest anywhere.

I'm not sure why this is. You could try and see whether a make install from your build directory results in something different (make sure to set DESTDIR to something valid).

Perhaps @Dirk Thomas can chime in?

Edit: just checked again and make install does result in the package manifests being copied over to the installation directory. After sourceing the setup.bash there, rospack find $pkg does resolve to the location in the installation directory, as expected.

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-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PRERFIX and make install did the job. This is rather curios... But thank you very much for the help

Pouya ( 2017-01-02 07:31:03 -0600 )edit

I can try to speculate why make install is needed: a devel folder has no special meaning outside a Catkin workspace. Only because of Catkin can we do tricks by symlinking / overlaying build, devel and src folders, but make does not do that. make install is then needed to ..

gvdhoorn ( 2017-01-02 07:59:58 -0600 )edit

.. create a flattened representation of the various directories involved, and only then does a package.xml make sense / is needed.

gvdhoorn ( 2017-01-02 08:00:51 -0600 )edit

Copying files from the source space to the devel space is being avoided (the main difference to a "normal" install). So the package.xml file stays were it is. After sourcing the setup file the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH should contain the source folder of the package (whatever build/.. is).

Dirk Thomas ( 2017-01-02 22:01:52 -0600 )edit

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rospack cannot find package made by cmake even after sourcing

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