Re: [ft-devel] freetype and harfbuzz

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> If FreeType2 building system supports a case that a developer
>> extracts the harfbuzz source to some directory and build at same
>> time (I think such style is popular for the people making cross
>> build toolchain at once: binutils + gcc), it would be acceptable
>> improvement?

The main question is: Is it *really* worth the hassle?

> Actually, it is exactly the case a friend has, and I am asking this
> question for him because he is a bit busy.  He is working on an
> installer for Windows.  But it seems that the design of his
> installer makes difficult to resolve the circular dep with the 3
> steps mentioned above.

This would be an excellent opportunity to improve his installer :-)

Note that it isn't a real circular dependency, since FreeType works
just fine without HarfBuzz; it just has limited auto-hinter module.

I suggest that you look around how other building systems (like
Homebrew for OS X) are resolving the issue.  IIRC, some provide two
FreeType packages with different build flags:

  freetype-simple -> harfbuzz
  harfbuzz -> freetype-complete

where freetype-complete simply overwrites the freetype-simple library
after installation.

> so if Freetype2 supports the extraction of harfbuzz source code and
> build it, it would indeed solve his problem

Basically, I don't object if this gets done in a clean way, this is,
without increasing the FreeType library size and having manageable
code that doesn't need to be updated constantly if HarfBuzz evolves.
However, I won't be able to work on this (and my interest is quite
limited, admittedly).  Any volunteers welcomed!


    Werner