DPKG (Debian Package Manager) vs pkgsrc

DKPG has one of the best multiarch support you can easily add new architectures with dpkg --add-architecture $ARCH to install foreign architectures.

DPKG and it frontends follow strictly the UNIX philosophy that one package should do one thing well.

eg:

Dpkg: does simple package management
APT and aptitude : adds repository and dependency tracking
debconf: does configuration
synaptic: allows mouse interaction to all apt/aptitude options

Due the popularity of Ubuntu, Debian and Linux Mint it is almost certain that you find the package you want as a pre-built deb package.

DPKG isn't as bloated as other package managers since it is only made for local package management.

You can use apt, aptitude, cupt, debdelta or apt-build on the terminal.

There are plenty of helpers to easily create packages.
You just need to create 5 files: source/format, compat, rules, control & changelog and run dpkg-buildpackage.

It is possible to interact/ask questions to all pre and post install scripts. This makes it possibe to add questions for package configuration or to display EULA/License screens that have to be accepted before installation.

Deb packages are simple ar archives with additional tar, lzma, bzip, gzip support.

This makes maintenance and support easy.

pkgin aims to be a tool similar to apt/yum for managing pkgsrc binaries by relying on pkg_summary for installing, removing and upgrading packages and dependencies, using a remote repo.

Has been adopted to be used on several Unix-like operating systems and Windows. It's also the default package manager of DragonflyBSD and of the (now discounted) Bluewall Linux distro.

Installs its own dependencies which means that it is very secure. Cannot install anything unless you use the "sudo" command which is in keeping with the Unix philosophy.

Fast software installation is possible by using binary packages. It's also easy to build from source which allows for different compile-time options (like different UI backends) as well as gaining access to pre-release versions of software in certain cases.

Backporting fixes can be done by cherry-picking updates from a newer branch (pkgsrc is released every 3 months) and creating a package. Sometimes bugs need to be fixed for production and there is neither a fix in newer pkgsrc nor the softwares upstream. So pkgsrc has tools like pkgdiff, mkpatches, etc. that help with developing patches and building binary packages from that. A bit of documentation about that process can be found here.

This means that you can install it fresh on a new installation of MacOS and have all your favorite apps installed right from the start.

Can be used from within Ansible to install packages on macOS.

This one works brilliantly.