With DarwinPorts, there is an environment available for installing Unix programs from source, similar to the BSD Ports structure.
What is it? With DarwinPorts you can very easily install Unix software directly from the sources without having to laboriously fetch and patch the sources first. That's the idea.
Basically a very convenient installation structure similar to Debian packages, only based on source. In this respect DarwinPorts is very similar to Fink. So why do you need DarwinPorts? I was initially quite enthusiastic because I assumed it would be the real Ports environment (similar to how GNU-Darwin for example uses the Ports from FreeBSD and thus already has a huge set of programs ready to compile - significantly more than Fink) from BSD. Nothing doing - it's its own development. And not even more software in it than Fink. And even better: the make install crashes for me with a bus error in pkg_mkindex.tcl
To be honest: we don't need ten different installation systems for Mac OS X, we need one that really runs smoothly and works. And so I'd rather stick with Fink, which works flawlessly and by now already has a somewhat fuller list of supported packages.
I found the original article at Der Schockwellenreiter.