Building ROS on OSX 10.9 (solution)

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Edit 5: These workarounds are no longer required. They are kept here purely for reference.

Some of the workarounds listed in this answer are no longer required as the changes have been merged into hydro. Below are the current workarounds still required to get ROS hydro working on Mavericks, suitable to both git and tar based rosinstall distributions.

OROCOS KDL Fix

There is a problem with OROCOS KDL API that is incompatible with libc++ and clang, discussed in more detail in PR 4 and PR 19. You will need to patch KDL source using both of these pull requests.

cd <ROS WORKSPACE DIR>/src/orocos_kinematics_dynamics
curl https://github.com/orocos/orocos_kinematics_dynamics/pull/4.patch | patch -p1
curl https://github.com/orocos/orocos_kinematics_dynamics/pull/19.patch | patch -p1
# it is not a problem if the following step fails
cd .. && rm -r build_isolated/orocos_kdl

You will also need to patch several dependent ROS packages. For the necessary robot model changes:

cd <ROS WORKSPACE DIR>/src/robot_model
curl https://github.com/ros/robot_model/pull/43.patch | patch -p1
# it is not a problem if the following step fails
cd .. && rm -r build_isolated/kdl_parser

for the necessary robot_state_publisher changes:

cd <ROS WORKSPACE DIR>/src/robot_state_publisher
curl https://github.com/ros/robot_state_publisher/pull/5.patch | patch -p1
# it is not a problem if the following step fails
cd ../.. && rm -r build_isolated /robot_state_publisher

OpenCV and Cuda

Currently OpenCV has issues when building with Cuda enabled, so you will have to disable it:

cd build_isolated/opencv/install
ccmake
# turn off the 'WITH_CUDA' flag and generate

Outdated workarounds no longer necessary

These workarounds are no longer necessary but I am keeping them here for historical reasons in case someone has an older workspace and doesn't want to update.

Prerequisite for any of the following steps is understanding how to checkout Github pull requests locally. The rest of these fixes are currently involve API breaking changes and are under review. I make no guarantees about their correctness, only that they should at least build on Mavericks. For all of the commands below I always your current working directory is your ROS workspace root (NOT src subdirectory).

Octomap Fix

For this particular octomap problem there is a fix committed upstream that should allow compilation with libc++ with Mavericks: https://github.com/OctoMap/octomap/pu... . Due to the way ROS packages things, mergeing this change in to the ROS octomap source in your hydro workspace involves a bit of hand work on the command line:

cd <path to your hydro workspace>/src/octomap
git remote upstream git@github.com:OctoMap/octomap.git
git fetch upstream
git checkout release/hydro/octomap/1.6.1-0
git cherry-pick b7aec9182e102da32f0f210197a55b827e0ae894
git cherry-pick 8a9722d0f479dcde680dc689e0d071e48bb32e99

Rebuild your catkin workspace and the octomap errors should go away.

ROSCPP Message Traits

There is a problem with the roscpp message forward declarations that is discussed in more detail here. The workaround:

cd src/roscpp_traits
curl -o include/ros/message_forward.h https://raw.github.com/ros/roscpp_core/e4dff32c8847f7e9e16b3aecebbbbaf7d84daf5a/roscpp_traits/include ...