Gentoo on MacOSX (or, Shut Your Yapholes You Simpering Idiots!)

(This is a repost of my post to OSNews.)
I'm one of the core Fink maintainers and I also maintain some packages (and have even recently done some development) on darwinports, so I hope I at least have a little bit to say about this. 😉
A lot of the comments are saying "why?!?!" Really people, you should know the answer by now. "Why not?" It's a fun hack, it's neat, it's satisfying when you accomplish it. Who needs another reason? If other people get something out of it, great.
As for "what this means", it means another infrastructure for porting packages. Yes, they're duplicating functionality... I made the same complaints when darwinports started out, but darwinports has done some pretty innovative things and has great plans for the future; I've since decided I no longer have the right to ask why -- it's not my place.
You'll find that the "packaging" (ie, making the package description) is the easy part. "Porting" is the hard part, and there is very little overlap in that space. A number of fink and darwinports developers hang out in each other's irc channels, and there's a lot of code-sharing that goes on patch-wise between the two. I maintain two sets of identical KDE packages, one in each, the only difference being how it's packaged up. I see no reason things won't work out that way with Gentoo in the mix too.
People really need to stop whining about what does what and instead just go with what they like. If we're all doing our jobs, very little overlap happens. Each system has it's own advantages. Fink is very stable and has the largest number of packages. Darwinports is more bleeding-edge, but also supports "pure darwin" and darwin/x86 where in many cases Fink does not. Portage just adds another bit to the mix. I expect the most likely reason to choose portage over Fink or dports is for bleeding-edge and maybe custom compilation flags, but it remains to be seen how well that works.
In general, darwin is still a 2nd-class OS as far as support for "out-of-the-box" building. The Gentoo folks will find they need a lot more patches to make things play nice on darwin than for Linux, so some of the "immediate update"ness of gentoo may not happen on darwin just because someone will have to actively fix patches on each release of a port.
All in all, chill out people. If one of these packaging systems isn't "good enough", it will die out on it's own. Darwinism (excuse the pun) will win out in the end. Otherwise, use what you like; I assure you, you won't be hurting my feelings. 🙂