Is this a possibility? I would love to see this happen 
Since I can’t include Panda in a .deb package, for example (you can only refer to binary packages, not include them. Big security risk to do otherwise), this is the only way to have a Panda-based app in a package repo.
Or is it?
pdeploy makes a deb file with the necessary contents to run it (it’s not necessary the entire Panda SDK to execute a Panda based application). At the moment, pdeploy doesn’t produce an rpm file, so this answer is valid only for the Ubuntu/Debian part, not the Fedora one.
It’d be too much of a hassle to get it included in the official repositories of a distro, not to mention the large amount of reworking that will need to be done so that the packages meet the distro’s guidelines.
We do host debian and ubuntu repositories ourselves, though, on archive.panda3d.org.
But yeah, as yaio said, pdeploy can make a .deb file with everything in it.
By hosting repos yourselves, do you mean these can be added as sources to Synaptic Package Manager?
If not, would it be possible to host the .deb on a Launchpad PPA?
Welcome to the forums!
You should add these lines to your sources.list (or in Synaptic):
deb http://archive.panda3d.org/ubuntu maverick mainEdit as appropriate for https, debian or other Ubuntu versions.
I used to upload Panda3D to a PPA, but that’s too limited. This works better.
I got the following error:
but I still get the packages panda3d, panda3d-runtime and panda3d1.7. A second refresh of sources resulted in no error.
When attempting to install I got a warning “You are about to install software that can’t be authenticated!” I know this is a new feature of Maverick. I can still install the software (I picked panda3d1.7 because it includes the runtime and replaces panda3d), but do you have keys I can download? Thanks!
Sorry, the packages are not cryptographically signed, so there is no key to provide.
Keep in mind that the ‘panda3d’ package is the old notation, so you might get an outdated version of the SDK if you install it.