pkg to end all pkgs

The ultimate pkg for MacOS X is one that would take any GNU source code and make the necessary changes to work under MacOS X and then compile it for you. I know this would be difficult and still wouldn't work with all applications, but it would be literally porting hundreds of apps to MacOS X at once! So if you're up to the challenge and want to help the MacOS X community, as well as the development of the entire MacOS community a lot, this is the goal to work toward.

You may want to take a look at <A HREF="http://fink.sourceforge.net/" TARGET=_blank>Fink</A>. It can build all packages from source using a straightforward package description format. The format has special fields for common porting fixes and lets you specify just the things that are different from a standard './configure; make; make install'. It uses dpkg (and the .deb package format) as a packaging backend to allow clean updates and removals.

As for mass porting: there's also the <A HREF="http://www.gnu-darwin.org/" TARGET=_blank>GNU-Darwin project</A>. They took the FreeBSD ports collection (which already builds 1000's of apps on FreeBSD) and ported it to Darwin / Mac OS X. However, they are having big-time trouble because many, many packages don't build cleanly on Darwin. There are just too many differences between Darwin and FreeBSD to make full automatic porting feasible.

(Disclaimer: I'm the guy who started the Fink project. Take everything with a grain of salt and look for yourself.)