Error in Installing the Cairo R Package - macos

Question

I am attempting to install the Cairo package in the development version of R on Mac OS X 10.7.4, but I'm running into an issue that I cannot resolve.
I have installed Cairo with homebrew (i.e., brew install cairo) and received the following message:
==> Caveats This formula is keg-only, so it was not symlinked into /usr/local.
Mac OS X already provides this program and installing another version
in parallel can cause all kinds of trouble.
The Cairo provided by Leopard is too old for newer software to link
against.
Generally there are no consequences of this for you. If you build your
own software and it requires this formula, you'll need to add its lib
& include paths to your build variables:
LDFLAGS -L/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.12.2/lib
CPPFLAGS -I/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.12.2/include
With the above message in mind, I attempted to install the Cairo package from R-Forge with the following R command:
install.packages("Cairo", repos="http://www.rforge.net/", configure.args = c("CAIRO_LIBS=/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.12.2/lib", "CAIRO_CFLAGS=/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.12.2/include/cairo"))
I receive the following error:
checking cairo.h usability... no
checking cairo.h presence... no
checking for cairo.h... no
configure: error: Cannot find cairo.h!
Please install cairo (http://www.cairographics.org/) and/or set
CAIRO_CFLAGS/LIBS correspondingly. ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘Cairo’
I repeated the same command without the repos argument (by default, I use the FHCRC mirror) with the same result.
At this point, the problem seems obvious: the file cairo.h is not present. But then I listed the files in the include/cairo directory. Here's the response:
ls /usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.12.2/include/cairo
cairo-deprecated.h cairo-ft.h
cairo-ps.h
cairo-script-interpreter.h
cairo-svg.h
cairo-xcb.h
cairo-xlib.h
cairo-features.h
cairo-pdf.h
cairo-quartz.h
cairo-script.h
cairo-version.h
cairo-xlib-xrender.h
cairo.h
So, I'm pointing the installation of the Cairo package to the appropriate place, but the error persists. I have tried variations, such as CAIRO_CFLAGS=/usr/local/Cellar/cairo/1.12.2/include, with no luck.
Thoughts? Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated.
In case it's necessary, here is my sessionInfo:
R Under development (unstable) (2012-08-08 r60208) Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin11.4.0 (64-bit)
locale: [1]
en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils
datasets methods base
other attached packages: [1] BiocInstaller_1.5.12
loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] tools_2.16.0

Answer 1

I had similar issue with cairo config error, and I already installed cairo with homebrew. Try below
brew install pkg-config
This solved mine problem.

Answer 2

A coworker and I just fixed the problem by ignoring all of what I typed above. Rather, we installed Cairo and all of its dependencies from source manually, thereby bypassing the usage of brew or variants like port. This worked like a charm, so I am not entirely sure what was wrong above.

Answer 3

After trying everything listed here, I found this blog post about installing the "full R package" using brew: https://luispuerto.net/blog/2018/05/11/installing-r-with-homebrew-with-all-the-capabilities/
What finally worked for me was building R explicitly with cairo (brew's default R tap uses --without-cairo and simply editing the tap did not solve the issue for me).
Works like a charm for me with R 4.0.2, cairo 1.16.0_3 under macOS Catalina 10.15.6.