So for doing Debian packages of Pd we could either elect someone to create portaudio packages that match our needs, or we'd need to make Pd run with PA 0.18, as provided with Debian. Choose your poison!
The poison I'll be choosing is to advocate reverting the change, and maybe even do it. If Tim wants to keep PA outside of devel_0_39 he should submit the idea to the democratic process that he advocates using.
feel free to check it in again ... that's probably the moment, when i'm going to fork off from devel_0_39 to have a codebase that i can use for my needs...