If you are using bam files solely to speed load times, you might also be interested in the model-cache-dir config variable. If you set this variable, it is the name of a directory that will be used to cache model loads as bam files. So you can distribute egg files with your application, and load egg files explicitly in code, but if the cache version is newer it will load that instead. You can also set model-cache-max-kbytes to specify the maximum size of the cache.
This has the nice advantage that you don’t have to build bam files by hand, and you can easily distribute an application that is independent of Panda version. On the other hand, the user does have to load the egg files at least the first time, and you don’t have as much control over the resulting bam files.
David