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Wanted to share a little of the work I a currently doing as it is pretty interesting. Recently I have been investigating means of using one system of package management across different UNIX systems as a part of a project. Off the top of my head, there are 3 real good options. The first and oldest is Pkgsrc from the NetBSD community (will proabbly do a write up later), Nix (from the NixOS project) and Ravenports. I wanted to highlight Ravenports as it is pretty interesting. Ravenports was started by a former FreeBSD developer. Prior to creating Ravenports, he had developed a package management system written in ada called Synth. As ada is not very popular and there were some early design decisions and new approaches that came out, he rewrote Syn and incorporated many improvements with creating Ravenports (writing it in C). As of the writing of this post, Ravenports supports FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS, Solaris, and DragonFlyBSD right now with ports to others in the pipeline. However, I personally have only played with it on FreeBSD so far and looking into jumping in on the porting effort on it to NetBSD. Ravenports is interesting in that it incorporates lessons learned from the FreeBSD ports system and Pkgsrc. Here is a guide that was written for me that I am sharing, it covers the install process and instructions for working with Ravenports the package manager and Ravenports the ports tree.