Hi, I'm a maintainer of several related softwares as part of the Debian Science Team, and I think it would be great to get libMesh packaged for Debian--once it's in the Debian archives, it'll also be available in subsequent versions of Ubuntu, as well.

I'm able to build the current master on Debian Unstable with ./configure --without-dtk and on the v1.3.1 tag I can build normally without needing to specify any flags, so that's good. (I saw the issue that necessitated the --without flag also reported in #1849, BTW.)

Anyway, I just wanted to create this issue to open a line of communication on the topic and to let people know that I am going to begin packaging libMesh. Once I have the packaging ready I can provide an Ubuntu PPA for any interested testers (I'll probably just re-use the FreeCAD Community Extras PPA) but there will be an additional wait in the Debian NEW queue. Since the next release of Debian, Debian 10, has just entered its first freeze phase, it's unlikely libMesh will make it in on time, unfortunately.