Homebrew tries to use the default libs and utilities that come with OS X / Xcode.
MacPorts and Fink try to create their own little microcosm of a Linux system complete with all libraries and utilities. They generally seem to fail at this because major packages are broken all the time and conflict in a million little ways with the system ones.
MacPorts and Fink try to create their own little microcosm of a Linux system complete with all libraries and utilities.
That's more like a philosophical (and failure prone) difference that both Fink and MacPorts intentionally abandoned through experience, not really a "miles ahead" difference.
Not reproducing Apple's OS dependencies is a nice idea, but let's say I want to use python2.7 with openssl 1.0. Apple only shipped openssl 0.9.8 in Lion. If I mix modules that use OpenSSL 1.0 and OpenSSL 0.9.8, weird stuff happens. Now what?
(The answer is: now you have to start reproducing OS dependencies. This only gets worse as the OS dependencies grow more stale).
They generally seem to fail at this because major packages are broken all the time and conflict in a million little ways with the system ones.
