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Question

I have tried without any success to install LASzip¹ ² (paper by Isenburg about LASzip) on Ubuntu 16.04.

The basic way gave me nothing relevant:

./configure && make & checkinstall

which seems to install some .a, .la, .so.6 and other .hpp files under /usr/local but no binaries (which are mandatory to install other "packages" like pdal)

I wonder if these tools were included in libLAS but it doesn't seem so: some of them does exist within libLAS and others not.

Answer

PDAL requires version 2.0.2 of LASzip.

Version 2.2.0, which, at the time of writing, is what you're getting from any ZIP download for Github clone includes the following release note:

A number of changes were made to the header files and a new minor release was made instead of a simple point release as a precaution.

Therefore, what you want to do is:

git clone https://github.com/LASzip/LASzip.git
git tag #List tags
git checkout tags/2.0.2
./configure
make
sudo make install

After this things should work swimmingly, at least for PDAL.

Edit (2019-03-27):

It works as well with version 3.3.1 (as of 2019-03-27):

cd /opt
git clone https://github.com/LASzip/LASzip.git
mkdir LASzip/build && cd LASzip/build
cmake-gui ..

Configure and generate project using cmake-gui. Then:

make
sudo make install