Problems compiling nodes using pcl in Ubuntu 11.10

Question

There seems to be an issue with compiling ROS nodes that use pcl on Ubuntu 11.10. When I try to compile my node on 10.04 I don't have any problems. Both installations were installed from the debian packages ros-electric-desktop-full and ros-electric-perception-pcl-addons.

1. Ubuntu 10.04, 32-bit, ROS Electric: Works
2. Ubuntu 11.10, 32-bit, ROS Electric: Doesn't compile

My node is pretty simple, mainly just visualizing a static point cloud that I create.

In the second case, I get the following compiler error during linking.

...
Linking CXX executable ../bin/publish_primitives
/usr/bin/ld: CMakeFiles/publish_primitives.dir/src/publish_primitives.o: undefined reference to symbol 'vtkSmartPointerBase::operator=(vtkObjectBase*)'
/usr/bin/ld: note: 'vtkSmartPointerBase::operator=(vtkObjectBase*)' is defined in DSO /usr/lib/libvtkCommon.so.5.6 so try adding it to the linker command line
/usr/lib/libvtkCommon.so.5.6: could not read symbols: Invalid operation
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
...

I manually added the required libraries in CMakeLists.txt (below) and it fixes the compiler problem.

rosbuild_add_executable(publish_primitives src/publish_primitives.cpp)
target_link_libraries(publish_primitives libvtkCommon.so libvtkFiltering.so )

Messing with the compiler flags for pcl is beyond me, so I'll leave it to the higher ups to figure out what is going on.

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Originally posted by Kyle Strabala on ROS Answers with karma: 186 on 2012-01-30

Post score: 3

Answer 1

It looks like there was a change in linker behavior. thread with links

Fedora documentation of the change

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Originally posted by tfoote with karma: 58457 on 2012-06-09

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

Answer 2

After upgrading either ROS or Ubuntu from an earlier distribution, you should clean your working trees and rebuild them. Three different ways to do that:

• rosmake --pre-clean
• make clean in every package
• check out new copies and build everything from scratch

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Originally posted by joq with karma: 25443 on 2012-01-31

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by Kyle Strabala on 2012-02-07:
I meant that I am using a fresh install of everything (Ubuntu 11.10, ROS Electric from deb packages). I have tried cleaning and re-building without success.

Comment by joq on 2012-02-01:
What does that mean? Can't you rebuild your working copies?

Comment by Kyle Strabala on 2012-02-01:
Unfortunately, my 11.10 system was built from scratch. Also, I had three other 11.10 users try it on their systems with the same results.

Answer 3

I don't know if this can help you but I had almost the identical problem and I solved adding ${PCL_LIBRARIES} in target_link_libraries, like

target_link_libraries(publish_primitives ${PCL_LIBRARIES} libvtkCommon.so libvtkFiltering.so )

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Originally posted by Saphrosit with karma: 197 on 2012-06-22

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by Neil Traft on 2014-07-31:
The PCL_LIBRARIES link should not be necessary if you are in ROS and you correctly specified the dependencies in your package manifest (as described in the ROS PCL tutorials: http://wiki.ros.org/pcl/Tutorials ).

Comment by Neil Traft on 2014-07-31:
Furthermore, if you want to include all VTK libraries, you can use find_package(VTK REQUIRED) and target_link_libraries(example ${VTK_LIBRARIES}).