How to insert ubuntu PPA’s to debian

Ubuntu created a very interesting service called PPA – personal package archives.

If anyone of you ever used debian (or ubuntu) you may be wondering how cool it could be, if your software could be in official repository so that people could just type:

sudo apt-get install blah

These of you who managed to get through all the bureaucracy and got the packages there, might be wondering how cool it would be, if that package which got build and published there months ago, could be ever updated to latest version of your software 🙂

Today, it’s both possible and very easy, thanks to PPA.

I am not going to describe the process of how to submit stuff to PPA, because that is explained on many places, but I am going to explain how PPA work and how you can use this powerful service on debian.

What is PPA

PPA is basically a repository server, where each user can create their own personal aptitude remote repository, using unlimited number of own GPG keys. There is basically no difference between PPA repository and any other apt repository.

How do I make it work on debian

There is no command apt-add-repository on debian, because PPA is ubuntu thing. That makes 2 problems:

* You can’t easily add PPA
* You may have problems with dependencies, as some debian packages are named differently than ubuntu packages

First problem can be overriden easily. You can either get the source code of apt-add-repository and install it localy, OR you can just insert the url of PPA in format of

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/USER/REPOSITORY/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main

to your /etc/apt/sources.list where USER is username on PPA and REPOSITORY is PPA. You also need to replace ubuntu version with any ubuntu version which is most close to your debian version, typically some LTS (precise, or lucid).

The other thing you need to do, is installation of GPG key of the user you want to download packages from:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys KEY

gpg -a --export KEY | sudo apt-key add -

Now you should be able to download and use the PPA repository.

You may be however facing the other problem with dependecies, and there is currently no other solution for it, than rebuilding the source package yourself with correct debian dependencies.

Petr Bena's Bl0g