> I checked out the VER-2-6-5 tag on the repo and ran autogen.sh, > which resulted in: [...]
This is OK.
> Simply running configure and make seemed to work but then there were
> compilation errors in freetype-demos.
>
> I tried checking out a ~2016 commit but couldn't really get it to
> compile.
I had success with
```
./configure --with-harfbuzz=no
```
HarfBuzz is only needed for better auto-hinting support, which is not
of interest in your case.
Werner
