afdko is now in Debian but that's only the first missing dependency. The others are https://github.com/daltonmaag/statmake https://github.com/fonttools/skia-pathops
skia-pathops doesn't look easy since it probably requires skia to be packaged. skia is embedded in Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, and Android, so I worry that skia will be a lot of work to package and maintain. As far as I can tell, no other distro (or even the GNOME release team) tries to build Cantarell from source. That leaves us as the only current distribution that is stuck on an old release. Thanks, Jeremy Bicha