ROS Kinetic Installation on MacOS (Homebrew, as of May '17)

Every now and again I nuke my ROS installation and build from scratch because of dependencies getting updated/my usecase changing. I prefer to have two installations of ROS on my system these days. Jade, for stability and feature matching with my platforms and Kinetic for testing and submitting patches on. I manage both in an eselectesque way (it’s a tool found on Gentoo Linux for managing versions via symlinks).

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sudo mkdir /opt/kinetic
sudo mkdir /opt/jade
sudo chown -R `whoami`:staff /opt/kinetic /opt/jade
ln -s /opt/kinetic/install /opt/ros/kinetic # or jade

OpenCV3

Homebrew uses an outdated brew contrib release which does not have CMake fixes for the freetype contrib module. Install it with --HEAD:

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brew install opencv3 --with-python --with-eigen --c++11 --with-contrib \
  --with-ffmpeg --with-tbb --with-qt --with-non-free --without-test --HEAD

Note: takes around 20 minutes to compile.

AFAIK, Jade still uses OpenCV2 while Kinetic has migrated to CV3. To build cv_bridge do 

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brew ln opencv3 --force

This may cause a problem with Jade stuff, so unlink and relink opencv2 if need be. Homebrew warns about this when you try to install opencv3.

Qt

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echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/qt/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

Other than that, there were absolutely no errors involved in compiling the desktop version of kinetic on MacOS. Wonderful. Easiest it’s ever been really.