Could not load the file sensor_msgs/JointState.h

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So do I understand your comment on ros/robot_state_publisher#110 correctly when I believe you had a Catkin workspace seeded with a .rosinstall file that you generated using rosinstall_generator but you specified ros_comm as the base package instead of any of the variants defined in REP-150? Then adding robot_state_publisher (again: from source) to that workspace failed to build as it could not find sensor_msgs/JointState?

If yes: did you not get CMake errors telling you that it could not find the sensor_msgs package in your workspace?

Yes, I used ROS-Comm because this variant is listed in the installation procedure.

With this package path, I did not have the robot_state_publisher dependency require to install the sick_tim package.

Then, the mistake that I made was to clone the git repository directly into the source directory (~/ros_catkin_ws/src) instead of installing it cleanly.

From now on, I install everything directly via the command rosinstall_generator robot sick_tim --rosdistro melodic --deps --tar > melodic-robot.rosinstall.