And my comfort language is "whatever works".
The FreeBSD ports collection is perfect for that. I don't have to worry about what some damn hairsplitting monks only interested in their little religious language do. I just pull in the port, and at the same time I get a nicely preconfigured build tree for the package that I know works and I know has all its prerequisites taken care of.
It's not perfect, I hate how it goes interactive on me without warning, but it's better than any other package manager I've used.
In fact I've used the result of installing a port to figure out what was keeping my RPMs from working on Red Hat.
