Among Linuxes, keeping up-to-date with MacPorts struck me as being most like Gentoo (arguably the least Mac-like entry on the shortlist of major Linux distributions). But after further experience it seems not to be exactly like Gentoo: with Gentoo, things break regularly, but you can often find a solution by Googling salient portions of an error message, and unlike computer situations in general it makes quite rational sense to try again 24 or 48 hours later if something is broken. MacPorts in this regard seems only like Gentoo in that you can get breakage by trying to keep your system up-to-date as intended.
Earlier breakage had me stumped about how to install Django; now I have Django installed, but its breaking on upgrading glib1; the last substantive change on the bug (http://trac.macports.org/ticket/21413) was about a year ago.
Is MacPorts really "Breaks like Gentoo but you can't fix it like Gentoo", or does it say "32 bit? Legacy! Ewww!" or something else? I'd like to know what a sane basic perspective is, and what I should and shouldn't expect of MacPorts. (Or if I've answered my own question in what I've said above.)