Thanks to the kind people in #asterisk (irc.freenode.net) I found: Checkinstall

This is a very quick and easy was to make your own RPM and Deb packages. When compiling your package, instead of running “make install” run: “checkinstall”

To build for most distributions, the configure script should be executed with the following options:
./configure –prefix=/usr –sysconfdir=/etc
so that executables, libraries and configuration files are installed to the expected locations.