Homebrew is a new packager for Mac OS X. I installed it, and hey, it works! I tried it on a fresh (clean install) Snow Leopard machine.

The installation instructions on git are a bit convoluted, so here's the abridged version:

1. Install XCode
2. sudo mkdir /usr/local
3. Drop the contents of the download in /usr/local 
4. sudo chown -R `whoami`:staff `brew --prefix`

I installed git this way: brew install git. Here's the output (notice how I didn't chown the first time round):

macbook:~ orestis$ brew install git
==> Downloading http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.4.2.tar.bz2
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Error: Permission denied - /usr/local/Cellar
macbook:~ orestis$ brew --prefix
/usr/local
macbook:~ orestis$ sudo chown -R `whoami`:staff `brew --prefix`
macbook:~ orestis$ brew install git
==> Downloading http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.4.2.tar.bz2
File already downloaded and cached
==> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/git/1.6.4.2
==> make install
==> Downloading http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-1.6.4.2.tar.
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Finishing up
/usr/local/Cellar/git/1.6.4.2: 379 files, 15M, built in 70 seconds

Neat. Next I will try grabbing software directly from source (I like to custom build macvim and git, for example). I'll update this post with news.