You should check out Homebrew for Mac. I've found it a little bit more reliable than Macports, and it's actually reasonably easy to create your own packages.

You should check out Homebrew for Mac. I've found it a little bit more reliable than Macports, and it's actually reasonably easy to create your own packages. To create a new package you can just `brew create http://foo.org/crufty-package.tar.gz` http://foo.org/crufty-package.tar.gz` and 90% of the time the generated recipe just works and the other 10% it requires you to tweak the (quite readable) ruby file. Also, while Homebrew has an official repo, it's managed through git and hosted on Github. So for any given piece of software, chances are pretty good that someone out there has packaged it.