I second the idea of building your own deb.

But if you're going to learn a DSL for building debs, why not just learn how to build debs? Your distro already provides the necessary build formula, along with well-integrated startup scripts, etc.

To start out, just build as given:

    apt-get build-dep nginx
    apt-get source nginx
    cd nginx-$VERSION
    dpkg-buildpackage

Then to customize, go into the source tree and update whatever you want to update, and rebuild. You'll see there's already a debian/patches directory where you can drop patches to apply automatically.

I tend to just keep the "debian" directory in source control, so I can take a fresh upstream tarball, check out my debian rules into it, and kick off the build.

I've done custom debian packages from scratch and always found it a pain. I've also done customized source builds and still prefer this approach because its simple, slimmer, easily version controlled, and wrapped up in a single command.

But there are many ways to fry an egg. I prefer this way, but overall having a package is a big plus for commonality between systems and convenience vs simply building from source.

It's a relatively simple task if you're on a Debian derivative to take the source .deb & add a new patch to it.