Solving Rustc 'cannot find -lxcb-shape'

I wanted to learn Amethyst, a pretty cool game engine made in Rust. But when I tried to compile the "Hello World" project, I got the error cannot find -lxcb-shape. This led to a few wasted hours and a lot of headaches, so I thought I'd share the fix here.

I first tried to just run apt get install libxcb-shape. It didn't exist. I thought this meant that the package wasn't in the Debian package list, but I was wrong.

Then I tried just googling my exact issue, but I gave up quick. I should have kept going, because my answer was there, but whatever.

I then moved to figuring out what lxcb was, and apparently it's some sort of X window system.. thing. I'm still not really sure what it does.

I found their GitLab page, and decided to try and compile and install it myself. There were a couple of dependencies I had to compile and install first, but eventually I got it installed.

It didn't work. All of those hours were a waste.

I went back to googling my exact issue, as I mentioned earlier, and found something. There was a stackoverflow thread that mentioned the exact same problem.

I should have read the entire stackoverflow thread, but I just went comment by comment until I found this, a package listing for Ubuntu. It had the incredibly memorable and useful name of libxcb-shape0-dev. Why there is a 0 there, I have no idea. There is probably a good reason, but I don't know it, so it annoyed me.

I installed that specific library, and it worked! My amethyst example was compiling! But there's something else.

I was gonna end it here, but then, writing this article, I went and checked that stackoverflow thread again, and one person had linked the README for the amethyst project. There was a list of dependencies that I hadn't installed. This whole thing was just me being an idiot and not reading. I have never channeled Druaga1 more than in this moment.

So, moral of the story, check the dependencies of things you install before going down a rabbit hole of self-compiling random libraries you now have no way of easily removing, so they'll just stay there.

Thank you for reading about this mess.