Homebrew is a packaging system for Mac OS X, similar to Fink or MacPorts. I have used both Fink and MacPorts, but do not like having an entirely separate system of installs. Homebrew can install in /usr/local like a normal, well-behaved installation.

I installed Homebrew in /usr/local with the recommended commands, except I used sudo instead of changing the owner of /usr/local as shown in the Homebrew docs:

$ cd /usr/local
$ sudo git init
$ sudo git remote add origin git://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git
$ sudo git pull origin master

Then installing a new formula is as easy as:

$ brew search svn
svn
$ sudo brew install svn

People can contribute new formulas; they are Ruby scripts that do the steps required to build the package.

I haven’t used this a lot yet, but this looks like a good solution to the problem. Any one using this yet?