| I've never used Homebrew, so can't comment on that, but in comparison to Macports, Advantages of pkgsrc: - Everything is a quick binary install. Macports has gotten more and more towards "mostly binary", but I still find it sometimes doing huge compiles. - Packages generally are installable, and work. Partly due to the quarterly-release model and the all-binary model, I find less breakage (esp. dependency issues) than when doing things in Macports. - Subjectively, the set of tools feels cleaner. - Can keep packages synced across OSs, if you use pkgsrc elsewhere (admittedly this is not that common a use case unless you run NetBSD or SmartOS, since typical users of a Linux or other BSD will use the native package manager). Advantages of Macports, - More packages - Often newer packages (e.g. macports is shipping TeXLive 2014, while pkgsrc has some mixture of 2012 and 2013). - More Mac-specific porting/debugging attention. Somewhat spotty how much, but for example you can choose either X11 or native Aqua versions of emacs, while pkgsrc does only X11 for GUIs. - Fairly easy to customize packages with the 'variants' system, although in practice I avoid this like the plague because your system quickly ends up compiling things for hours if you use non-default variants. |