There seem to be two main camps regarding package management.
Install from sources
Install from binaries.
This makes a big difference when one of two things: dependencies and updating.
Now, I prefer the debian way in this case. apt-get install and then apt-get dist-upgrade as wanted. this works for other packages installed the same way, when it causes problems is if you compile something from source on the same system. When debian recently released 4.0, my routine updating of the system caused some problems with software that xenotrope had compiled from source. why? glibc had been updated.
now with the BSD or gentoo way, this wouldn't really be a problem as the binaries would be compiled from source every time. However, this has caused me to get tired of BSD's ports system. installing the simplest package can take ages as all dependencies have to also be compiled. Now the latest version of FreeBSD claims binary installation and updating for its ports system. Arguably apt-get on debian already has this as you can specify apt-get install to install and compile source. are we seeing convergence to a standard?