> Ah, and now the ugly parts. How much value is all of this anyway, compared to fetching the tarball from the project's site and running make on your own? I gue

> Ah, and now the ugly parts. How much value is all of this anyway, compared to fetching the tarball from the project's site and running make on your own? I guess the "patches to apply" is the most valuable part of all of this. it is a standard way, well documented. And local. Suppose you need a new minor version quickly of a package or a dependency... with traditional package managers you have different versions of difficulty setting up the build environment (I have done rpm and pkgsrc packaging alike, also portage), and it may be pretty involved to do an update of a dependency somewhere. pkgsrc (and ports style package management) is really handy if you need to do some custom stuff in a no-fuss way. Also if you have compiled a fair amount of packages, you know painful it can be sometimes, broken automake config, random esoteric build tools, and if ever had to target non-linux, then all of these are amplified. IMHO pkgsrc is relatively simple to comprehend, and easy to get started, compared to other build packaging solutions. Not as fast or fancy, but very rugged and can work "offline" as other comments called out.