Just to give you an update. I've ALMOST got it building. I hit a bug in 6.5.1 missing an #include and ran into an issue that I'm not sure why it didn't break things before. I ended up having to add --with-freetype=... because it wasn't getting detected properly (if at all).
Additionally I had to add a new BR: for ftgl-devel. I'm not sure if I got everything yet as now that I got it mostly fixed each build attempt takes some time. Let me know if you're interested in the result when I'm not. I'm not sure you'd want to DL the whole SRPM as I'm using the unmodified source (~200MB) but I can package up the spec and updated patches. Richard