(In reply to comment #0)
> Stable release 1.8.8 configure script disables fontconfig/freetype by default
> on MacOSX. In 1.9.4 it turns on for some reason.
Does ./configure enables both fontconfig and freetype on your machine?
Since cairo (as of 1.9.4) requires freetype 2.1.9 and fontconfig 2.2.95 and OSX ships respectively 2.3.5 and 2.6.0, one would expect both to be enabled.
This does not happen because freetype is "automatically" configured thanks to freetype-config, but no such tool is available for fontconfig and OSX default fontconfig isn't managed by pkg-config.
freetype wasn't automatically enabled in 1.8.8 because it required fontconfig (in fact, you can see that fontconfig didn't appear at all in 1.8.8 font backends).
> Which leads to out of the box compilation errors, as it can't link to a
> proper freettype library.
On my laptop (running 10.5) the compilation is successful.
Since right now I'm unable to reproduce, I think it could be caused by missing headers on your machine. Can you please check the output of "freetype-config --cflags --libs" (and the content of the directories it prints)?
Please post more details about the compilation failure and/or check the content of /usr/X11/include and /usr/X11/lib. If they contain freetype and fontconfig headers and libraries, you should even be able to get a (working) cairo build with freetype and fontconfig enabled, simply by adding the following additional variables in your environment:
FONTCONFIG_CFLAGS="-I/usr/X11/include"
FONTCONFIG_LIBS="-L/usr/X11/lib -lfontconfig"

As per discussion on IRC (2010-04-13) this bugreport is probably not relevant anymore.