Coming from the FreeBSD world, I long for the day when a similar ports collection gets implemented. Fink is ok in the time being, but the FreeBSD ports collection is IMHO much simpler, and way more comprehensive. I recall an article where Jordan Hubbard's wish list included a more comprehensive ports system, but it seems that no one has written one as of yet.
If I recall correctly, Fink is based off of some debian code...but its biggest downfall is that its collection is far too small. I think they tried to reinvent the wheel a bit too much. FreeBSD's ports collection is HUGE and I wonder why Apple, or Fink for that matter didn't just emulate it. Darwin's userland is a FreeBSD derivitive, so it would have made sense to me to keep things similar in that regard.
FreeBSD's collection is huge for the reason it's controlled by a team of committers who take stuff thats been ported by folks like you and me, give it a cursory glance to ensure all the ducks are in row, then boom, they commit it to the cvs servers... Once that has taken place its an easy matter to keep your ports collection tree up to date with a cron job or a few simple keystrokes.
Once your tree is up to date, a simple cd /usr/ports/www/netscape; make; make install; make clean and voila, Netscape's most current port is installed. And you don't have to worry about finding the source code... the Makefile takes care of all that for you...
Yes, FreeBSD's port system lacks a few things, but all in all I think that the bang for buck far outstrips that of Fink. I don't know what Fink's policy is on others offering up ports to work in their collection, but if they want their collection to grow to the mammoth size that FreeBSD's has, they need to implement some sort of mechanism for Mac Hackers to offer up their ports to the collective.
In conclusion, Mac OSX has done wonders for the Apple community. It has exposed many a non-unix person to the wonderful world of preemptive multitasking, security, and many other *nix niceties. Mac OSX has been succesful thus far in hiding UNIX from most of its users...which is fine to a point, but lets not forget the FreeBSD heritage that gives our newest and favorite OS its "balls" so to speak. There is a lot that we as mac osx hackers can offer back, but lets not be afraid to borrow what others have already offered up long before Mac OSX ever came into being.
