A new proposal has been made by Neil McGovern

Apr 20, 2015 06:50 GMT  ·  By

The Debian project has a new Project Leader, Neil McGovern, and he was elected just like any politician. He presented a list of promises about what he would do or try to do if he becomes a leader and one of those is about PPA support.

PPA is short for Personal Package Archives, and they are basically third-party repositories, which can be significant or small. It's a tool used by developers to provide apps and updates for those apps to Ubuntu users, so this is the platform that technically supports it. Even if Ubuntu is based on Debian, it doesn't mean that the former also supports PPA, which is a shame.

The Ubuntu community has been making use of PPAs for a long time, and they have proven a very useful tool. In this way, users no longer depend on the official repos for some of their apps, and they can get the latest updates straight from the developers, which is must faster, most of the time.

PPAs for Debian are a proposal, not a certainty

Neil McGovern comes with a lot of proposals, but they won't just get adopted right away. Any major change still has to pass through a technical committee and get voted upon, so it's not a done deal. There are a lot of technical issues to work out, but it's not an impossible task.

"I will push for implementation of "PPA" archives, and modernizing our build and infrastructure system by working with the FTP Masters, wanna-build team, and DSA. It should be much easier for us to produce a working system with the correct tools, and some of our core infrastructure has not been keeping up with what we need to make such a large system," said Neil McGovern in his proposal.

PPAs are a great tool, but they are nowhere near perfect. For example, it's possible for anyone to make a PPA with some apps without him being the developer, and users could end up hurting their systems if the individual who set up the PPA had nefarious intentions. It hasn't happened so far, but it's not impossible.

It looks like Debian is going through some interesting changes, so it will be fun to watch how it's transformed under the new administration.