Indeed. MacPorts has the additional advantage of using upgradable and removable packages, rather than polluting /usr/local (or worse, /usr) with unmaintainable

Indeed. MacPorts has the additional advantage of using upgradable and removable packages, rather than polluting /usr/local (or worse, /usr) with unmaintainable detritus of various .pkg installers. MacPorts packages do occasionally fail to build, but (1) the maintainers do respond to tickets opened in their Trac system, and (2) most problems I saw had to do with Python packages, and MacPorts handling of Python apps seems to have improved recently.