You could use fpm.

But the point is: can you pack every single dependency in your project? Usually you'll need something from the outside distro (libc usually). Then if you're building on a different host than your target, you may experience issues or different runtime behaviour.

It depends what you're packaging. C/C++ code linked against dynamic libraries? Yes, you're going to struggle to package reliably without using the native tools. Java code packaged as a bundle of jars, with no dependency except a JVM? Go code compiled statically, with no dependency except libc? Simple portable packaging should do the job.

Not automated, but quick and you could certainly automate it (alas I don't build many apps from source these days):

- Make a spec with / (actually the build root) in %files section

- Run the build

- List the resulting package contents (which is whatever was put into the build root)

- Manually remove any common dirs

- Update the %files section and rebuild

I use FPM (https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm) for that and it works wonderfully. You can convert a tarball to RPM/deb pretty seamlessly most of the time.

I use FPM for architecture independent projects as well. But if you're building for a different target you're out of luck.

I was thinking about a docker-fpm-builder myself by the way, so maybe we'll meet again :-)