... which is a blessing and a curse: When they are doing a good job, that's perfect because it means that some software which wouldn't run correctly now runs co

... which is a blessing and a curse: When they are doing a good job, that's perfect because it means that some software which wouldn't run correctly now runs correctly. When they are doing a bad job, they might anger maintainers ("I didn't add this bug - this was added by macports - complain to them!"), or they might introduce additional security issues not present in the upstream package (see the Debian openssl bug from 2008) It might also mean that you're not getting the latest versions of upstream packages because adding those patches and rebasing them on top of upstream changes takes time. Being close to upstream was a selling-point of homebrew back in the days when it was just a collection of scripts to make it easier to build original source distributions of common Unix software.