This is a nice overview. I've had mixed success in ports contributions. If the app you're packaging is "normal" then the whole thing is pretty reasonable. If the thing you're doing involves 7 bajillion CPAN packages and cross dependencies with something large and complex, you're going to have a bad time.<p>Overall, I'd say the process of making ports is slightly easier than packaging on some other platforms, except when you encounter exceptions--which can happen with software written with an expectation of Linux.