When you come from Linux and begin to use Mac OS X, you suffer a degree of (german*) "heimweh", that is, homesickness, for a number of reasons. The BSD command-line utilities are less powerful than GNU counterparts, and a lot of utilities that Linux users take for granted are not available in Mac. It is generally possible to download the source code and compile all of them, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
The biggest cultural shock is the lack of an "apt-get", which puts every application within reach. So, most of the "ports" projects like Fink, DarwinPorts etc. offer a central repository and installation via apt-get. At principle I loved this scheme, made me feel home. I even installed some KDE apps :)
In time, you learn more about the Mac OS X way of life and ports like Fink begin to feel strange:
* Everything installed via "ports" goes into /some/folder, creating a sort of "digital ghetto" of second-class applications;
* Dependency hell, a thing that is VERY annoying in Linux, is back again (albeit confined to the ghetto), while Mac OS X applications tend to be independent of 3rd party libraries. Every application has all needed parts inside its bundle, including kernel drivers.
* Reliance on a central repository
Enter Rudix, a different approach to the problem, which mixes a lot better with Mac.
In Rudix, every application is a separate package. Since most of packages are command-line apps, they are not bundles to drag into Applications, but .pkg files that install things in /usr/local. Usage of /usr/local is another nice touch of compliance with UNIX.
Most Rudix packages don't depend on other packages. The last version I installed still had some residual interdependencies but Rudá Moura, the maintainer, has been working to make very package completely independent of the others.
So, if you want exactly one application, e.g. GNU fileutils or mpg123, you just download that package from Rudix repository, install it the normal way a package is installed and Mac, and that's it. Personally, I have the whole repository downloaded in a folder, and cherry-pick the applications from there on demand.
A secondary function of Rudix is to serve as a good sample of how Mac packages can be made out of some UNIX application.
