Okay so I've informed myself a bit and it seems that pkg_alternative is a semi-third-party integration to pkgsrc that just symlinks some applications for better system integration. While I do see that this has an use-case im not sure if that also should be done with the .app's and fonts for macOS. It seems as if it would be the same as just ln -s'ing but with a simpler interface. I do also see that just putting it into /Applications is not a great solution neither because pkgsrc may be chosen to be installed as an user on macOS too. Maybe the best solution is to just write a small daemon that copies over the files from the ${PREFIX}/Applications to an user selected location.
For me personally, the solution is to just put the copy step to the INSTALL/DEINSTALL scripts because I have pkgsrc globally installed.
Best regards,
Ivan (arcathrax)
It might be good to look at sysutils/stow and/or sysutils/depot, both of which allow you to make the same kind of thing that nixos's profiles do - install into one location, build a symlink farm to that location, and selectively (by PATH/MANPATH and maybe LD_LIBRARY_PATH) choose which binary/library gets executed.
Years ago, there used to be a similar mechanism called package views in pkgsrc, but it complicated things, people didn't like it (with cause), and so it was removed.
Best,
Al