Comment 12 for bug 1058777

If I understand correctly, the Debian/Ubuntu package is built from packages from the repo. So, it is a missing package, as the packager must build it using the opencollada debian package. The pre-built binary from Blender has already been built with all these dependencies in a non-Debian fashion (and thus could not be part of the repositories).

However, as the upstream bug reports fix released, this looks like the Blender package should be able to be built correctly for Debian repositories now. The upstream package appears to be here: https://packages.debian.org/stretch/opencollada-dev