About 4 months ago my hard drive and various other gubbins in my MacBook died. I spent then next three and a half or so months running the laptop off an external hard drive which has a bootable backup I had fortuitously made two weeks before the drive crash. After the MacBook was repaired a few weeks ago, I was handed back a clean slate in terms of the operating system install.

I was kind of pleased about this because I had not kept proper notes about how I got my build environment for QGIS set up, and my previous installation was very messy with a combination of from source installed stuff and downloaded frameworks that often duplicated each other. With a clean OSX install I resolved to be a good QGIS hacker and keep detailed notes on getting your OSX QGIS development environment set up from scratch. The above link leaves the old QGIS version <= 0.8.0 notes in place and adds a new section that covers the installation of all dependencies and the build process for QGIS 0.9 developement versions which are now built using CMAKE.

I tried to avoid compiling dependencies from source as much as possible. To this end the excellent frameworks provided William Kyngesburye on his web site kyngchaos.com proved invaluable. Great work William! Also the work of Tom Elwertowski (fixing MacOSX aspects of the new CMAKE system) and Martin Dobias (creating the CMAKE configuration for QGIS) has been fantastic, and the helped resolve various issues I had along the way to the point that I believe building QGIS on Mac OSX to be a fairly pain free experience now.

The notes still probably will need a few tweaks as time goes by - in particular I am still working to get the new Python Bindings for QGIS to compile nicely. Hopefully they will ease more potential Mac Developers of QGIS on board and encourage them to contribute.