In my mind, the following distinction should be made:

• spack create: create a new package
• spack edit: edit an existing package

However, spack edit is doing double duty, because if spack create fails or your software cannot be downloaded, then you need to run spack edit -f to create a new package. This is kind of confusing, but more importantly both lib/spack/spack/cmd/create.py and lib/spack/spack/cmd/edit.py have completely different default templates. The template in edit.py doesn't have license info, doesn't contain FIXME info, isn't PEP8 compliant, and assumes Autotools instead of saying Unknown build system.