Ports

here we come to see the light of "how-to-build-your-software":

• portage may be the strongest as regards keywords to steer buildsets
• macports may be the best as regards language primitives to steer the builds - well documented too: https://guide.macports.org/chunked/reference.phases.html
• pkgsrc is likely the most rich in arch-specific patches and tuning
• ports of freebsd, AFAIK is the richest is build recipies
• debian w. CUDF extensions, is the most generic for dependency resolution mechanisms
• rpm specs is possibly the most applied when it comes to HPC infrastructure provisioning
• easybuild is the top choice when it comes to HPC applications context (build + modulefile)

did we miss anybody? :-P

also ref. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11799009/pkgsrc-ports-portage-macports-etc

some extra bits to check:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_management_systems # at the end of the page
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_collection
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBake
• https://raw.github.com/icy/pacapt/master/pacapt