Re: [ft-devel] freetype and harfbuzz

[suzuki toshiya]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> The main question is: Is it *really* worth the hassle?

I was thinking there are several existing software supporting
"built-but-not-installed-yet" tree by pkg-config, so it would
not be so difficult for Unix-like systems. But...

>> 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.

Oh, the target is Windows! I cannot help much. I don't know how
Windows developer builds harfbuzz (except of the cases with cygwin
& mingw).

> 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.

Indeed. If the target is Windows, there would not be system-wide
harfbuzz nor freetype, so building temporal freetype-simple would
not be so harmful action (although I accept troublesome works).

>> 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!

I don't think duplicating the codes from harfbuzz to FreeType2 is
good idea, because it is written in C++, and it's development is
unfinished yet (as written).

Regards,
mpsuzuki