BSD ports system

[Scott Haneda]

I am thinking of working on a project where cost may not allow the end product to remain on Mac OS X hardware.  This means I would like to chose a package management system that most closely mimics what I am familiar with, in an OS I am familiar with.

After a bit of looking around, I think that any of the BSD's will suit me well, with a lean on FreeBSD or OpenBSD.  I like OpenBSD for it's bare bones locked down methodology, but worry that I will be hardware bound in many of my decisions as it simply may not support the hardware I may need to throw at it.  

Any suggestions, in that if I must move away from Mac OS X on this project, and want to be as similar to Mac OS X as possible, which is my best BSD to use.  For example, I would like to use an OS that uses launchd over cron, like Mac OS X, or any of those other types of features that I already understand on OS X.

Or, can I literally just use Gnu-Darwin OS and be in perfect parity with Mac OS X aside from the Finder and other GUI based things.  Does this mean I could even use MacPorts on a Darwin based BSD OS?

This all leads me to my final thought, which is, has any effort ever been made to make a BSD ports to MacPorts type of converter?  Either as a standalone converter to get the ball rolling, or something that works in real time, and would always be able to use any BSD port as it stands.

Looking over their ports repository, it looks to me like things are done significantly different than MacPorts.  However, when all is said and done, both are instructions that tell software how to build, so in that sense, this seems highly possible.  There are 20K of them, not sure of that is good or bad, it may be too many for the MP project at it's current capacity.

Any thoughts or ramblings on this would be appreciated.
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