Trying to build Graphviz 13.2 on macOS. If I’m not mistaken, pangocairo is built with the quartz backend on macOS and does not use freetype on that platform.
I actually built and installed libfreetype2 on this system, but I’m not sure if pango uses it – it could be that I built pango first before I had built freetype2. I remember reading about some cyclic dependencies there, but can’t remember.
However, the GraphViz configure script will still look for the libpangoft2 library and exits with an error if it is not found.
I build graphviz on MacOS all the time, that’s my daily driver, and wasn’t aware of pangoft2 or that it’s a freetype2 backend for pango, or that graphviz configure.ac probes for its existence. I’m using Homebrew, where apparently pangoft2 could be the default pango installation. If you’re on Macports, maybe you get something different,
For some reason I’m reflecting on comments in the last day or two about Amanda Stent’s instructions from 15 years ago about building graphviz smyrna, where she said to first delete all of Macports and reinstall everything from scratch, that we thought was a hilarious idea.
YMMV
Not sure what the ultimate objective is, but it may be possible to exclude cairopango at configure time and just go with –-with-quartz=yes though also if you do that I would not be surprised either way if some features like loading external SVG and Postscript shape files still work.