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The main general benefit of pkgsrc is that it's cross-platform and, having been around since 1997, now runs on 22 different operating systems. This means that rather than having to run Homebrew or MacPorts on OS X, rpm or apt on Linux, ports on FreeBSD, dports on DragonFly, cyg-apt on Cygwin, .. - you get the idea - you could instead just run pkgsrc across all of them, and only have to worry about one set of tools and only have to update one software repository. pkgsrc will happily run as an unprivileged user in your home directory if you just want to compliment the system package manager. For OS X specifically, we provide this binary package repository to make it very easy for people to get started. pkgin has a very familiar interface for people used to other binary package managers, so after a couple of commands to install the tools you can start installing from 11,000+ binary packages quickly and easily. For developers there is a lot that pkgsrc offers in terms of aiding portability, and due to the large number of supported platforms a lot of infrastructure to support them, but that is a whole topic by itself. Reversing the question, I don't see that Homebrew or Macports have many benefits over pkgsrc, other than Homebrew is arguably easier to write new packages for (if you know ruby), and Macports has more packages. However I will be glad to admit I'm no expert on either of them, so if there are other advantages please tell me so we can take a look at improving feature parity. |