Comment 9 for bug 254978

I'm the release maintainer for the Panda3D project, and I'd love to offer any assistance if required. We currently offer Ubuntu and Debian repositories at http://archive.panda3d.org, but it'd be cool to have Panda3D in the official repositories.

Panda3D supports two audio libraries: OpenAL and FMOD Ex. It can easily be compiled without support for the latter - OpenAL is already in the repositories, so that should be not much of a problem.

The only other libraries that Panda depends on that aren't currently in the repositories are libsquish (DXT texture compression), libvrpn (for VR hardware), and libfcollada (support for COLLADA 3D format). All of these are open source, and I've uploaded source packages to the aforementioned PPA. I'm not much of an expert at debian packaging though, so the quality is probably not up to standards. All of these libraries are optional, but recommended.

We don't have a makefile, but the equivalent for "make" would be:
python makepanda/makepanda.py --everything --verbose
makepanda can automatically generate a .deb file by adding the --installer flag, but I assume that you'll want to build a source package.
The equivalent for "make install DESTDIR=target" is:
python makepanda/installpanda.py --prefix /usr/local --destdir target

We have plans to migrate to CMake, but Panda3D is a big project, so it may take a while for that to happen.

PS. I'll be on vacation for two weeks starting tomorrow, so I won't be able to reply during that time.