How to install libicui18n.so.58 on Ubuntu 18.04?

Question

While running my application on Ubuntu 18.04, it fails. Using the trace command, I found that one library is missing on my machine:

user@user-Box:~/Debug$ strace -o log -f ./test_project 
./test_project: error while loading shared libraries: libicui18n.so.58: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Searching a bit on the web, I found that I can install the package like this:

user@user-Box:~/Debug$ sudo apt-get install libicu-dev
[sudo] password for user: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
libicu-dev is already the newest version (60.2-3ubuntu3.1).

But the installed version is version 60. How I can install version 58 on my machine as well?

Solution

The version in the repos for the version of Ubuntu that you are using is 60.2 which means that you can't install an older version from them. You can add another repo that has it or download a .deb file that has it but I'd highly advise against that as it can and most likely will break your system.

The only thing that you can do is to build it from source and add it to your environment when you want to use it. You can get the source code here:

https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/releases/tag/release-58-3

Get icu4c-58_3-src.tgz for C and C++ or icu4j-58_3.tgz for Java.