Having become fed up with dealing with rpmbuild, spec files, debian control files, dh_make, debuild, and the whole lot, I automated my way back to sanity. The result is a tool I call “fpm” which aims to help you make and mangle packages however you choose, all (ideally) without having to care about the internals of your particular native package format. The goal of this project is not to undermine upstream packaging but to grant everyone the ability to trivially build and edit packages.