14 DAY TRIAL // One of the promises made by the new Debian leader, Neil McGovern, was that he will push for the implementation of PPA support. It's an interesting proposition, but it doesn't mean that Debian will support the existing Ubuntu PPAs.
PPAs are third-party repositories put together by either developers or simple users, and they are all hosted on Launchpad. They are only used in Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros such as Linux Mint, elementary OS, or any of the official flavors. On the other hand, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so you would naturally think that PPA should work there too, with some tweaks.
The problem is that Debian is upstream for Ubuntu, and that makes it hard, if not impossible, to adapt the OS to work with PPAs that have been designed for Ubuntu users. And, from the looks of it, this is not even what Neil wants to do. Sure, he wants to have PPA support, but it will be something specific to Debian. If anything, Ubuntu devs could make the Debian PPAs work with their system.
Debian and Ubuntu are very different systems
Despite the fact that Ubuntu is based on Debian, the two systems are pretty different. It's easy to see why the two operating systems won't be able to share PPA, but at the same time, it's easy to see why Debian needs this feature. It provides some flexibility for Debian developers that they couldn't get otherwise.
Neil McGovern recently gave an interview for Linux.com, and he also answered a couple of questions regarding PPAs. Please keep in mind that this is still an idea, and nothing specific has been done until now in this direction.
"The main aim of PPAs is to improve the workflow of Debian members, so they can easily create alternate versions of software that work with the main Debian system, and integrate them into the archive. Although Debian has a good relationship with Ubuntu, and other downstream distributions, we have a different focus. Keeping all the main libraries in sync would create a lot of effort to allow this to happen, and it's not something we really have the time to do while developing our own distribution," said Neil McGovern.
It's very likely that Debian will get its own PPAs, but it remains to be seen if there will be any kind of interconnectivity with Ubuntu. From that looks of it, that's not going to happen, but plans change all the time.