Upak - Gentoo Highlights
Gentoo Portage was inspired by BSD Ports. It has many outstanding features:
- a single tool (emerge) to update the tree, install/deinstall/upgrade packages and carry out most other tasks
- slots allow several versions (branches) of one package to be installed simultaneously
- masking - built in support for specification of supported build environments
- USE flags
- built-in distcc/ccache support
- build packages without installing them
- one of valid licenses in the ebuild
- ebuilds are shell scripts that set variables, call and define functions
- lots of helper functions, like enewuser and edos2unix
- some support for FHS
- eclasses - collections of macros
- great documentation
- can run on many Linux/BSD/Solaris systems