Problems building Stanford CS106B projects with Qt Creator

Question

I'm trying to take the Stanford CS106B course using their free online resources (I'm not a Stanford student). Since they now require a login ID to access many pages on the current quarter's homepage, I am using the archived page from the first quarter 2015, located here:

http://stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs106b/cs106b.1154/

I've seen a few similar questions from others who were having trouble building the assignment projects, but they were all using other IDE and/or OS, and they were all getting different error messages.

I first tried Qt Creator 5.5 but when I got errors, I uninstalled it and installed Qt Creator 5.4.1. This is the version recommended on the archived older page so I figured the assignments on that same page would be compatible with this version. I've tried it on a machine running Windows 8.1 and another running Windows Vista. No matter which version of Qt Creator or Windows I'm using, every time I try to build one of Stanford's assignments or sample projects I get the following messages in the Issues window of Qt Creator:

    cannot find -liberty

    error: Id returned 1 exit status
    collect2.exe

The Compile Output window shows the following errors:

    I:/Program Files/Qt Creator/Tools/mingw492_32/bin/../lib/gcc/i686-w64-mingw32/4.9.2/../../../../i686-w64-mingw32/bin/ld.exe: cannot find -liberty
    collect2.exe: error: ld returned 1 exit status
    Makefile.Debug:247: recipe for target 'debug\simple-project.exe' failed
    mingw32-make[1]: *** [debug\simple-project.exe] Error 1
    mingw32-make[1]: Leaving directory 'I:/Moved from Drive 1/Documents/QT Creator projects/build-simple-project-Desktop_Qt_5_5_0_MinGW_32bit-Debug'
    makefile:34: recipe for target 'debug' failed
    mingw32-make: *** [debug] Error 2
    09:42:28: The process "I:\Program Files\Qt Creator\Tools\mingw492_32\bin\mingw32-make.exe" exited with code 2.
    Error while building/deploying project simple-project (kit: Desktop Qt 5.5.0 MinGW 32bit)
    When executing step "Make"

I should also note that I downloaded a sample project that was offered within Qt Creator, and I was able to build and run this one. It's only the Stanford projects that give me the errors.

I'm new to C++ and to Qt Creator so there is probably something simple that I'm failing to do. I'd appreciate any help.

The error message tells you exactly what the problem is, the linker cannot find the iberty library (whatever that is). Is it installed? — cmannett85
Each assignment includes the Stanford CSS Libraries (also located here: stanford.edu/~stepp/cppdoc ). These are supposed to be all the libraries we need for the assignment. There are a number of libraries in this folder but none of them match the error message. I haven't found any reference to this library anywhere in the course materials or the Stanford website, either. — treeline

Marc Marc · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-28T12:40:48

Modify the .pro file so that it no longer tries to link the "liberty" library.

In the simple-project.pro file on line 107 there is a reference to the "liberty" library. I commented that out and the the example simple-project compiles.

LIBS += -lDbghelp
LIBS += -lbfd
LIBS += -liberty <-place "#" in front of this line
LIBS += -limagehlp

Problems building Stanford CS106B projects with Qt Creator

1 Answers