Not to be critical, but isn't Homebrew or Fink good enough? What features does your package manager offer that are better than these active projects?

A very valid question, I've been a Fink user, then MacPorts, then Arch OS X, then Homebrew and now Arch OS X again, and I've got some more detailed writing about this that I ought to publish one day. From the top of my head:

- PGP-signed repo db + packages (Homebrew relies solely on git SHA1s)

- package binary deltas

- building new packages is very simple thanks to ABS (Fink and MacPorts are a pain)

- doesn't write everything as a single user in a possibly multi-user machine (yes people sometimes still do share machines)

- doesn't get clobbered by software that puts stuff in /usr/local (installs in /opt/arch)

- daemons such as postgresql can run as their dedicated user

- uses sudo, so can do stuff Homebrew won't (like populate /etc/shells, /Library/LaunchDaemons, /Library/Extensions)

- makepkg builds under user, "install" with fakeroot, only pacman needs root

- synergy as an ArchLinux user, so have the benefit of a single way to manage packages

To each his own, and Homebrew is awesome (I've contributed some stuff there myself) but sometimes there are itches to be scratched: no one use case is exactly the same as another.

Sounds interesting, I will check it out for sure.

I'm mostly happy with Homebrew but I have had trouble occasionally with the multi-user thing. Because some people (at least one!) still use different user accounts on the same Mac, e.g. "work" and "private."

I wonder how mature Nix is on OS X.

I don't have any Apple hardware anymore, but I just wanted to mention how fantastic this package manager is. NixOS quickly became my favorite OS, simply because of the sheer power of Nix.

I've wondered about this myself. My thoughts always ended up deciding that what we need is a Mac equivalent of apt, which relies on the existing `installer`, as apt relies on dpkg.