Portage vs pkgsrc

WIth portage you can decide and customize which dependencies to install through some thing called USE flags. These are keywords that when defined, will tell Portage that you want support for the chosen keyword.

Slotting is a feature which allows users to install multiple versions of a software simultaneously. This is especially useful for libraries which have changed interfaces between versions.

With portage you can either compile packages from source or you can download and install their binary versions.

Adding supplemental repositories, aka overlays, is easy with eselect-repository or layman.

With portage you can view a list of all the programs that you can install by going to /usr/portage and running ls.

Portage uses a sandbox as a safety measure during build processes. This is done to ensure that no packages accidentally write outside a 'safe' location.

By default, portage doesn't delete or move any customized config files, thus enabling competent users to modify any config file however they want.

If you need faster resolution, you can run pkgcore for search and portage for installing, and they work well together.

You can fully control all packages if you use it properly.

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.