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from the original project page:

debbuild was written to be able to create packages that will install cleanly on Debian systems without going through the head-beating I found was required to follow the Debian New Maintainer’s Guide, and pretty much any other Debian packaging guide. It uses the build process and command-line options of rpmbuild, but produces packages that will install on Debian systems.

[...]

If you’re careful about filesystem paths, commands, pre/post/(un)install scripts, etc, etc, you may be able to write one spec file that you can use to create packages that will install and work correctly on both Debian(ish) and RedHat(ish) systems.

starting from version 0.11.3 of debbuild the commits of this project deal with

• handling tarballs compressed with various packers
• extracting specfiles from such tarballs
• improved handling of the %setup and %patch macros
• configuration and invocation of debbuild
• some nuts and bolts under the hood

some – but unfortunately not all – of these improvements have made it back into the original source tree.

after version svn@210 this project took a life of its own.

• fully externalized macros
• conditional build stuff
• advanced option handling
• %autosetup/%autopatch
• many more nuts and bolts under the hood