I actually came to OSX from Ubuntu and felt like I was in the dark ages without a package manager.  The first time I tried to compile PHP ( 5.3.2 ) on an upgraded ( Leopard -&#62; Snow Leopard ) machine, I had a million problems with the system's iconv and had to recompile a million packages.  I then had to delete my iconv stuff, recompile it into /usr/local, then figure out exactly which binary from the original install to leave behind so that things would be detected properly with everything else.  I think a lot of that has to do with php's build and search paths ( eg, it was finding headers in /usr/local, but trying to link to binaries in /usr ) but I can't help but feeling that with a proper package manager, that never would have happened.  Macports can be pretty good, but I don't want to have to have so many things duplicated on my system.<p>EDIT: Grammar