I've had MacPorts completely explode in my face several times when installing a seemingly innocuous package - some shared library gets replaced due to a require

I've had MacPorts completely explode in my face several times when installing a seemingly innocuous package - some shared library gets replaced due to a requirement, and suddenly every utility I've installed doesn't work. Eventually I got to a point where I only used MacPorts to install ImageMagick and compiled everything else by hand; so far homebrew has felt like a more disciplined version of "compile it yourself". I can't say I've had any problems with compiling Ruby gems against homebrew besides some settings that needed to be overridden in the MySQL gem, so that hasn't been a problem for me. I kind of have mixed feelings about the ownership. So far I've been running it in /usr/local owned by my user and haven't had any problems, but I can see the security argument for not doing it. It doesn't feel any different then compiling your own binaries and leaving them in your home directory, something I've had to do on several hosts I've had in the past. (Also: Snow Leopard doesn't install anything to /usr/local by default, so if you're starting from scratch there's nothing to take ownership of...) Overall, I've rather liked it so far. We'll see if I regret it...