The good part of ports is pretty much the same things that makes Debian's package management so highly-regarded - things like a central repository of managed packages with intelligent dependancy management.

The bad part of ports is that it's on BSD.

The ugly part of ports is that so many packages install into /usr/local.

Actually, the lack of coherent SysV startup logic is what I dislike the most about BSD. That and how far behind Linux so many tools appear to be (for instance, ps on a not-very-recent Linux has nearly a hundred switches; on a modern FreeBSD it has a mere two dozen). But /usr/local/etc comes a close third.

Wade.