We already mentioned DarwinPorts some weeks ago.
Honestly, I use Gentoo Linux at work (next to Mac OS X) so I’m quite tech-savvy if it comes down to the application installation or compilation, but I still managed to bunk my DarwinPorts installation. Repeatedly. I don’t even want to think about when I tried to install Gnome and had to patch my X11 with newer Freetype2 libs.. was a mess… Anyway, if that sounds similar to you, then here’s a nice little solution to some of these problems: A set of scripts to simply the DarwinPorts installation.