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That was my idea too, and why I started working on a light fork of pkgsrc to try it. Sadly, nobody who has to maintain systems at scale will use a package manager that just pulls random repos and "makes and prays". I've been trying to find the middle ground since then but haven't come up with it yet.

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Though I presume you know about it, I haven't seen Homebrew[1] come up yet. It has native support for installing from tarballs and pulling from repos.

[1] http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Maybe I misunderstand how MacPorts works, but I vaguely recall seeing it pull source code directly from projects.

MacPorts? I was using NetBSD pkgsrc, which does either source builds or packages from the same system. So, you can lock it at a particular source revision/release and make an official package like a .deb, or do a gentoo/MacPorts style source build.

As I understand it, Arch's pkgbuilds are similar. The nice thing is that they have the flexibility to do whatever you want, whether it be updating a svn repo, downloading a binary, curling a script, building from source, whatever.

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