Pallet, a generic packaging tool (currently supporting .gem and .deb) was released as an open-source project by the company who developed it: Damballa, Inc.

This library allows you to build packages of any supported type through a small Rakefile stanza. With an API similar to the Rubygems Rake task, it currently enables developers to build both Ruby Gems and Debian packages without requiring intimate knowledge of either packaging system.

It also supports the ability to include a Ruby Gem inside of a Debian package, with accompanying postinst/prerm scripts to install it with gems -- thereby satisfying the dependency requirements for multiple packaging systems simultaneously.