[HarfBuzz] Building and testing HarfBuzz 2.3.0 on MinGW

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ebrahim Byagowi <ebraminio at gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2019 16:02:46 +0330
> Cc: Nathan Willis <nwillis at glyphography.com>, Harfbuzz <harfbuzz at lists.freedesktop.org>
> 
> > My conclusion was that ICU is not needed, but maybe it has some advantages,
> 
> It will be a good idea if someone ships ICU anyway, they use their ICU (or glib, which can provide unicode
> callbacks also) instead having extra a harfbuzz buildin UCDN, at least for size reduction reasons.
> [...]
> > Glib is needed for running a large part of the test suite
> 
> It can provide unicode callbacks also as just said before.

Thanks, but I still don't think I understand: given that Unicode
character properties are all derived from the same UCD database, what
would be the motivation to use Glib or ICU for these purposes, even if
these libraries are already linked into a program?  Do ICU/Glib
support some extensions that UCDN doesn't, or are more likely to
support the latest Unicode Standard?

> > It is not clear to me what are GObject and Introspection needed for; it would be good to clarify that.
> 
> Roughly, gnome way of writing language bindings, ie. make non C/C++ language users able to interact with
> the library with Gnome provided facilities. Not needed for C/C++ or users don't use gobject introspection
> anyway.

Thanks, this part is now clear, I think.

> > Btw, the information about "Building on Windows" is IMO outdated:
> > nowadays one can use the "normal" Unix configure/make steps assuming
> > one has MSYS and MinGW installed.  That's what I did.  There should be
> > no need anymore for any Windows-specific build procedures.
> 
> Not everyone will agree with you on that I guess, maybe different use-cases or something, as you see vcpkg
> project https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg/graphs/contributors is still a pretty busy project, that's why I
> suggest vcpkg for non-msys Windows users, even instead directly using our cmake on Windows. Vcpkg
> itself uses our cmake but can switch to meson if needed and it can target Linux in addition to Windows, for
> use-cases I am not aware of.

So maybe that section should be extended to mention both methods?
People who build HarfBuzz on Windows are likely to have MSYS installed
anyway, because building the dependencies mostly does require it.  And
even if they don't have it already installed, it's good to mention
that, just so that the reader would know such a method is supported.
When I first read that, I was left wondering whether the normal
configure && make paradigm will get me a port as functional as the
method described on that page.

Thanks.