On Aug 2, 2011, at 5:18 PM, Ken Conley wrote:
> It's possible that the problem is also inverted -- rather than having
> ROS choose a package manager, perhaps it's ROS that gets wrapped in a
> package manager, s.t. port users have port-ROS and brew users have
> brew-ROS.

That might not be a bad approach, but a lot effort is probably duplicated for each package manager. In the case of MacPorts, you can stuff much of the ROS build magic into a ROS PortGroup [1] so that creating a port for each ROS package is fairly easy. If needed, you could also create ROS variants [2] of certain general purpose ports that needed to be patched/tweaked to enable ROS support.

[1] http://guide.macports.org/#reference.portgroup
[2] http://guide.macports.org/#development.variants

-- 
Mark Moll