Pacman vs pkgsrc

Pacman is objectively one of the fastest package managers around. This is because it's very minimalistic and it installs only prebuilt packages.

Both are also provided through packages which keeps them up to date.

Pacman does not overwrite modified configuration files. Instead, it saves a .pacnew file for it which you can later merge at your leisure.

Pacman has a relatively simple syntax which is easy to get used to. For example: pacman -Syu to update, pacman -S foo to install etc...

Commands are not long and there are not many different commands to learn by heart.

Hooks are scripts that can run automatically before and after Pacman transactions like installation and removal of packages. For example, Pacman hooks can be used to automatically create system users and files during the installation of packages. Pacman hooks can also be used to delete configuration files and clear caches during the removal of packages.

Here are three examples: Powerpill, Yay, and Octopi. Powerpill extends Pacman by enabling asynchronous downloads of packages from multiple mirrors using Aria2 and Reflector. Yay extends Pacman, by enabling automatic download, compilation, and installation of packages from the AUR. Octopi extends Pacman with a GUI frontend written in Qt.

Pacman makes it fairly easy and straightforward to create your own repository with signatures.

The instructions and configurations for using a custom local or remote repositories are pretty simple and straightforward.

Uses Zstd compression for fast downloads & updates.

It allows the system to always be up to date.

And looks cleaner and nicer with such thing enabled. Simply find and uncomment "Color" option in /etc/pacman.conf or add it yourself if it doesn't exists.

Allows to change its downloader from internal to any other like wget or aira2.

However default Arch Linux mirror servers does not provide deltas, so it is not so useful like with DNF.

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.