icu-uc not found

[sandwave]

Hi,

I tried building Freeciv and can't get past this.

...
checking for icu-uc... no
configure: error: icu development files not found. Adjusting PKG_CONFIG_PATH may help

configure failed

I'm using Cygwin with the following command (the --enable-client=win32 parameter was rejected as win32 was not a valid value):

./autogen.sh --with-libiconv-prefix=/usr --host=mingw32 --disable-nls

I tried adding the following line to autogen.sh but it didn't help:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="cygdrive/c/dev/cygwin64/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin"

That directory contains icui18n57.dll and icuuc57.dll along with a bunch of others.

In Cygwin I have libicu74 and libicu76 installed as well as mingw64-i686-icu and mingw64-x86_64-icu, and 3 other related libraries. I couldn't find any libraries named libicu-dev, as mentioned in this thread:

viewtopic.php?t=93023

My goal is to modify the autoworker AI so I don't have to micromanage the engineers so much. First step: compile...

Thanks for any suggestions.

[cazfi]

If you really want to use Cygwin, first see doc/INSTALL.Cygwin document in the source tree.

But for compiling freeciv on Windows, msys2 is far superior environment to Cygwin. See doc/README.msys2.

[sandwave]

That INSTALL.Cygwin doc did help me get through the config. It compiled the server executable but failed on the client due to a couple of compile errors in gui_main.c.

I was using this doc after googling how to compile Freeciv:

https://freeciv.fandom.com/wiki/Install-Windows

Seems it's out of date. Maybe better just to either publish the INSTALL files from the distribution to the web, or change the web instructions to simply refer to what's in the distribution.

Just to follow up a bit. I had a freeciv qt 3.0.8 installation but decided to reinstall it as 3.1.5 so I could possibly switch in the server executable I was able to compile. A couple problems came up.

1) The qt 3.1.5 qt executable could not find the qt plugins. I noticed the QtCore.dll in the same directory as the executable so I tried editing the freeciv command file to set the QT_PLUGINS directory to root of the installation instead of <installdir>/plugins but this didn't help. I installed the GTK client instead which was able to startup fine.

2) When I switched in the freeciv-server.exe that I had compiled to the 3.1.5 installation directory, the client popped up error messages about missing cygcurl-4.dll, cygwin1.dll, cygiconv-2.dll, and cygicuuc76.dll. The freeciv-server.exe was a few hundred KB smaller than the original installed one.

Now I'm going to try msys2 as you suggest, because I'm assuming it is what you use and will be better tested/maintained from a dev point of view.

[cazfi]

About msys2 there's also this wiki page: https://www.freeciv.org/wiki/Msys2_As_D ... nvironment

[sandwave]

I was able to build and install both qt6 and gtk3.22 installers with msys2 but the qt installation still didn't work. Do you have any idea why? I'm finding the gtk interface much less efficient so far but that's partly because I'm not used to it.

[cazfi]

Does the Qt-client installer from https://www.freeciv.org/download.html work on your system? If not, then the problem is not any mistake you make in the build process.
What Windows version you have?

[sandwave]

The qt client installer from the download site doesn't work either. I have Windows 11.

[jessee33]

what happen?chicken avisopinie

[cazfi]

I have no idea what could be the problem. You're the first one to report such Qt-client problems on Win11.

Does it give any output if you run it (freeciv-qt.cmd, to get plugins directory right) from the console?