Is it possible to build python-pcl against pcl_ROS?

I am using ROS Kinetic, Ubuntu 16.04, python2.7

Motivation

I wish to use PCL functionality (PointCloud_PointXYZRGB) in a python ROS node.

Context

I found that python-pcl 0.2.0 built against PCL 1.7.2 but that the function I needed: pcl.PointCloud_PointXYZRGB() wasn't available, only pcl.PointCloud() I don't know if this is the limits of PCL 1.7.2 or python-pcl

After a lot of messing around I managed to get python-pcl 0.3rc1 to build against PCL 1.8 (built from source) with cython 0.25.2 and I found that this gave me the functionality that I needed.

Ideally I would like to be able to build some version of python-pcl against pcl_ROS, we are probably going to do dozens of ROS/python-pcl installs and I found building and installing PCL 1.8 to be quite error prone and difficult to diagnose - plus we then have multiple versions of PCL on every system and I'm concerned about that causing complications.

Any ideas about the best way to proceed?