I’ve been using the mac long enough that I’ve gone through several of the package management systems for installing additional open source tools. I started off with Fink which I really liked since it was based on dpkg. Then it became clear that the community had switched to using Mac Ports (formerly Darwin Ports). I was a bit disappointed with this because the package management wasn’t as good as it was with Fink, but it kept pace with the newer OSs better than Fink. Now the community has shifted again, this time to Homebrew. Homebrew seems to have learned a lot of lessons from the previous. The most notable is that most of the Formulas are in binaries and they use git for the formula list rather than rsync for the port list. Also anyone wanting to make a formula would fork the repo on github, commit their formula, and initiate a pull request. Given this adds simplicity on the developers, hopefully homebrew will last longer than the others.