Hi Stephen,
Looking at the way you detect Xft, freetype, etc., I wonder why you
don't just require pkg-config for building XEmacs. Both packages are
supported (/usr/X11R6/lib/pkgconfig/xft.pc, /usr/lib/pkgconfig/freetype2.pc)
Better still, in case of freetype, you might want to take advantage of
$datadir/aclocal/freetype2.m4 instead of rolling your own code which,
with all due respect, might not work with a future version of
freetype.
Recently, builds of a number of packages (xpdf, lesstif come to mind)
started failing because freetype started enforcing a policy that had
long been emphasized as being the official way to integrate the
library.
# AC_CHECK_FT2([MINIMUM-VERSION [, ACTION-IF-FOUND [, ACTION-IF-NOT-FOUND]]])
# Test for FreeType 2, and define FT2_CFLAGS and FT2_LIBS.
# MINIMUM-VERSION is what libtool reports; the default is `7.0.1' (this is
# FreeType 2.0.4).
This will actually take care of the commandline arguments (such as
--with-ft-prefix for instance) as well.
I didn't have a chance to check out your branch, but the freetype
tutorial has some information about the official way to use their
headers:
http://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/tutorial/step1.html
Hope that helps.
Best regards,
Marcus