I'm searching a way to maintain (as easy as possible) the binary packages for my programs. While for Windows it's easy and there are lot of solutions out there, I still did not find anything worthy for Linux yet.

There is the http://autopackage.org/ , and they boast it being universal, but it needs to download a front-end in addition to the installer itself, seems a bit too complicated to me.

Is there a way to build an *universal* rpm? Can Debian-based systems use rpms? Is there anything like WinRar/7-Zip self-extracting archive with ability to extract into a pre-defined path and run the specified program?