Is there a reason to use either of those systems over homebrew? Since homebrew seems to have a lot more community support now.
But, Debian's package management works better than either of them, so I've sort of been moving towards doing any kind of unixy work in a VM and treating OSX as just a desktop.
Battle-hardened *NIX admins rightfully laugh at this attitude, but for a lot of web developers who use their laptops as a "sharp tool" and do all the heavy lifting in linux vservers, it makes sense to have a slightly laxer approach to package management.
(and then there's the increasingly common cases of build scripts just being broken on macports, because it receives less and less community attention now. this can combine with the above dependency graph problems to produce situations where it's easier to just nuke /opt/local and start again.)
I haven't found an easy way to add/update packages to finc or macports, but I could contribute to homebrew within 5 minutes.
I wish we would see more work distribution patterns like this in fields outside code/programming.
But yes, arguably, `brew` is moving forward very quickly.
brew isn't just moving forward quickly, it has really just out right replaced MacPorts and anyone still using MacPorts is living in 2007.
"There are several reasons why MacPorts uses its own libraries. It makes ports more consistent across different versions of Mac OS X. For example, if we can rely on openssl 1.0.0 from MacPorts, we don't have to test every port that needs ssl for every available openssl installation. Apple's software tends to break from time to time (e.g. openssl refuses to build with an old zlib, but for awhile Apple shipped the old headers of the vulnerable zlib version). Even if Apple's versions aren't broken, they're rarely up-to-date. Apple has a habit of not updating the libraries in Mac OS X until absolutely necessitated by a security vulnerability." [1]