Doing a cargo build --release is not enough. You need to specify which qsv variant you want to build:

# for qsv
cargo build --release --features apply,generate,lua,fetch,foreach,python,full
# for qsvlite
cargo build --release --features lite
# for qsvdp
cargo build --release --features datapusher_plus

I can’t build qsv with the python feature.

If you get the error:

error: linking with `cc` failed: exit status: 1
...
  = note: /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lpython3.8
          collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

You need the python 3.8 development libraries to build qsv with the python feature. On Ubuntu Linux:

sudo apt-get install python38-dev

I need to use qsv on an old Linux distro that doesn’t have the latest GNU libraries.

You can build qsv and statically link it with musl, so you can run it on older distros. To do so, you’ll need to install mustl-tools as well:

$ sudo apt-get install musl-tools
$ cargo build --release --features apply,generate,lua,fetch,foreach,python,full --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl