@mwfearnley Yes, that's the recipe file. You can look at it to see the patch I had to make to get it to compile, though that was 5 years ago; I'm not sure if it still works properly.

Thanks, I wasn't aware that the version in util-linux was based on the one from SourceForge. I did eventually figure out how to get the util-linux one to compile, but it comes with many other utilities, a lot of which are redundant on OS X. Anyways, see my updated answer for the homebrew formula of the original. Beware, installing from source with make install can cause issues if /usr/local/bin' is ahead of /usr/bin` in your PATH as it installs hardlinked to stat. The formula avoids this and only installs under namei.

Also, there is a bottle (binary) of cairo in homebrew that can be installed without compiling if you're on Mountain Lion or above that might save you some trouble. You can see homebrew trying it on the first line but most bottles don't support installing outside of /usr/local

For starters, homebrew doesn't really like it when you put it somewhere other than /usr/local, but you haven't pasted the actual error, just the error of the parent process, so it's hard to tell what actually went wrong.