“Building Blender for macOS” at
https://wiki.blender.org/w/index.php?title=Building_Blender/Mac&oldid=10549
is missing body text for the “Download external libraries from Subversion” topic.
Perhaps the following lines can be added to the terminal code block in the “Download Sources and Libraries” section.
cd ~/blender-build
svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/darwin lib/darwin
Is there another way to submit this suggestion about wiki.blender.org?
If you follow that guide and build with make from the source dir, it will realize the libs are missing and download them for you.
I used Xcode as described in the guide rather than make which was not successful.
From the guide:
Now you are ready to get the latest Blender source code from Blender.org’s Git repository. Copy and paste the following instructions into a terminal window. These will create a blender-build folder off your home directory and download the latest source code, ----> as well as addons and external libraries. <-----
mkdir ~/blender-build
cd ~/blender-build
git clone http://git.blender.org/blender.git
cd blender
make update
if you skip ahead in the guide, you’re bound to miss things, be sure to run this, cause you are gonna need the submodules for blender to run properly.
Well, shazbot. I looked back at my command history and I missed pasting
cd blender; make update
Thank you for your quick reply and guidance.
hi everyone. i’m brand new and this is my first thing. i got involved to help with the stereoscopy side-by-side editor view (fullscreen mode only). i ran into some issues following the build instructions for mac:
when i ran this command it simply failed with a permission error:
make update
however, running this command separately worked:
svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/darwin lib/darwin
(thank you so much @mrgibson
however it requested that i manually grant permission first.
now make update starts compiling nicely 
(actually it’s still compiling)
cheers
Can you paste the exact error? I ran this very command make update on my Mac on Friday, and it worked just fine…
Could have possibly been due to python3 not being installed, no longer require that for make update now:
https://developer.blender.org/rB64c8e9a2196f657261e737ba62d1cb479e04a518
The wiki had mention that python3 might be necessary, but even better now that this problem no longer exists.