In article 87em0ynp0m.fsf@cloaked.freeserve.co.uk you wrote:
Does anyone know of a BSD-ish ports tree being developed for Linux? Either currently, or a project in the past? Is it worthwhile, or does a suitably structured source directory and some discipline make it irrelevant?
I'm certainly not aware of anything of that sort. I suspect that it would be irrelevant, given a decent packaging system; Debian, for example, has apt-get, which will happily get source for you, and I can't imagine it would be amazingly hard to build a shell script that would get the source and put it in an appropriate place in your sources tree, and then invoke debbuild or dpkg-buildpackage on it. Are you thinking of a more generic solution, rather than something tied to one specific packaging method?
Aq -- note that my answer for "generic solution" is "make everyone use .debs" ;-)