uh ok so roast beef is some kind of package manager that is for bleeding-edge programs. so basically it does not have its own repositories. instead it just will download source from the upstream repository and will do all the necessary steps to install . you get things that are as fresh as possible. i am talking about really fresh like your eggs and milk. roast beef saves you from having to look up the repository locations for all the stuff you want to build from source. it also abstracts away the differences in build processes. say you want the latest version of such a package as gnu emacs. so you grab the source but you know emacs is a little different from other packages and requires "make bootstrap" in between the configure and make step. with roastbeef all the complexity of such things is hidden from you. and if you have a lot of stuff built from source you can keep them all up to date with a single command. the motivations behind this are made more clear in a blog post: http://technomancy.us/106 == man why you even got to do a thing