A thousand times this. As someone who has been fascinated with package management for a long time, my first reaction to FPM was horror. FPM is by and for people

A thousand times this. As someone who has been fascinated with package management for a long time, my first reaction to FPM was horror. FPM is by and for people who resent package management and want to avoid actual packaging work, not people who are passionate about doing it well. You want people who, when tasked with creating a package for a distribution format that is new to them, look not to tools like this, but to the conventions and standards of successful distros which use that format as examples. You want 'native' engagement with those packaging formats, not hacks like FPM. The parent commenter's suggestion is an excellent one.