um, your second statement has nothing to do with the first statement. The whole point of a good package management system is so that you don't have to do a

    tar xvzf foo.tar.gz;cd foo;./configure && make;

for every piece of software you want.

Installing from source has no relationship to package management. Even if we compile both library L and application A from tarballs, we're still doomed if there's no database entry somewhere to warn the sysadmins that switching major versions or uninstalling L may blow up A which depends on it.

Glad to see someone else building real OS packages (it's not hard!) rather than hoping that nothing happening outside their single-language ghetto can hurt them.

I don't think he wants to install from source. It sounds like he wants definitive, tested, binary packages.

What is he missing? I use Emacs on the Mac. AquaEmacs is nice. Sometimes getting binaries is a hassle. I use homebrew these days.

Linux is a great platform. However, it's still lacking the polish and commercial support. Where's Photoshop CS5? OmniGraffle? The big thing now is I'm doing iPhone/iPad development. I still have a Linux server but it looks like I'll be doing my main dev on a Mac for the foreseeable future.