installing harfbuzz 1.0.1 on CentOS 5 - centos

Question

I'm trying to install harfbuzz-1.0.1 on a CentOS 5 machine where I do NOT have sudo access, and hence need to install into non-standard locations. I have downloaded and unpacked the source code, and added what I believe to be the relevant dependences to my $PKG_CONFIG_PATH. These packages include:
freetype2
icu-uc
Checking that '$PKG_CONFIG_PATH` is correct:
$pkg-config --modversion freetype2
9.22.3
$pkg-config --modversion icu-uc
55.1
Within the unpacked source directory, I ran:
$ ./configure --prefix=/some/custom/path
# produces lots of output, but summary here
Build configuration:
Unicode callbacks (you want at least one):
Glib: true
ICU: true
UCDN: false
Font callbacks (the more the better):
FreeType: false
Tools used for command-line utilities:
Cairo: true
Fontconfig: true
Additional shapers (the more the better):
Graphite2: false
Platform shapers (not normally needed):
CoreText: false
Uniscribe: false
Other features:
Documentation: no
GObject bindings: false
Introspection: false
However, make fails with the following error:
In file included from hb-glib.cc:31:0:
hb-glib.h:50:22: error: 'GBytes' was not declared in this scope
hb_glib_blob_create (GBytes *gbytes);
^
hb-glib.h:50:30: error: 'gbytes' was not declared in this scope
hb_glib_blob_create (GBytes *gbytes);
^
hb-glib.cc:389:22: error: redefinition of 'hb_blob_t* hb_glib_blob_create'
hb_glib_blob_create (GBytes *gbytes)
^
In file included from hb-glib.cc:31:0:
hb-glib.h:50:1: error: 'hb_blob_t* hb_glib_blob_create' previously defined here
hb_glib_blob_create (GBytes *gbytes);
^
hb-glib.cc:389:22: error: 'GBytes' was not declared in this scope
hb_glib_blob_create (GBytes *gbytes)
^
hb-glib.cc:389:30: error: 'gbytes' was not declared in this scope
hb_glib_blob_create (GBytes *gbytes)
^
make[4]: *** [libharfbuzz_la-hb-glib.lo] Error 1
I can't determine anything from the config.log file, but then again I'm not exactly sure what to look for. I'm guessing that perhaps there's an unmet dependency somewhere, but I'm kind of at a loss at this point. Any help would be greatly appreciated and I'm happy to provide more info if needed. Thanks a lot.
If it's helpful, here is the full config.log.

Answer 1

The glib GBytes type was added in glib 2.32.
The version of glib is CentOS 5 is 2.12 which is much older.
The harfbuzz configure setup should be checking for a compatible version of glib and not getting as far as compiling before failing. That's a "bug" on their part.
You get to either use an older version of harfbuzz that can use the version of glib that CentOS 5 ships with or you get to build and "install" your own copy of glib too.