From the post: "Homebrew helps you compile different kinds of software on your mac, making it feel almost as easy as apt-get'ing a package on e.g. ubuntu. " (emphasis added) This is something I've noticed from using both OSX and Linux for the past few years — unless software is available as a drop-and-install package, it's universally _easier_ to install in Linux* than it is in OSX. Given the market for OSX and the a…
If anything like this happens in a dependency of your module, you're probably going to have to recompile all of the downstream dependencies by hand, or risk breaking your development system.
To avoid all of this you end up compiling static versions of the libs from your dependencies, and linking them statically to your module. This is particularly true if you don't want to be at the mercy of upgrades to those dependencies in your distribution that break your code.
Looking at things from the other side, there have been various package managers for OS X that give some of the ease-of-development available thanks to yum or apt-get. At the moment homebrew seems to be getting quite a bit of traction, and has addressed many of the pain points that predecessors such as MacPorts and fink have had, making OS X decidely more linux-like when you're writing the software without plans for distribution.