title: How to install pycairo on osx?
body: <p>I am trying to install the <a href="http://cairographics.org/pycairo/" rel="noreferrer">pycairo</a> (Python bindings for the <a href="http://cairographics.org/" rel="noreferrer">cairo graphics library</a>) under OSX.</p>
  
  <p>I started with</p>
  
  <pre><code>easy_install pycairo
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and got: </p>
  
  <pre><code>Requested 'cairo &gt;= 1.8.8' but version of cairo is 1.0.4
  
  error: Setup script exited with Error: cairo &gt;= 1.8.8 not found
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So I went to cairo's site and downloaded the latest package (1.8.8) of cairo, and also the latest package of something called pixman (both source packages -- couldn't find osx binaries)</p>
  
  <p>unzipped both, each in own directory.
  for pixman, the regular <code>./configure ; make ; sudo make install</code> worked just find
  for cairo, ./configure seemed to work, but make failed with:</p>
  
  <pre><code>In file included from cairo-analysis-surface.c:37:
  cairoint.h:71:20: error: pixman.h: No such file or directory
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What am I doing wrong?</p>
  
  <p>And why do I have to struggle so much to get a software library to work on an os that "just works"? Why isn't darwin more like linux?</p>