I very much enjoyed Martin’s appearance in the recent mintCast podcast, especially the Compiz news. I am running Debian Sid with MATE 1.8.1 from the repository. I’m perfectly happy with MATE on Debian, except that I miss Compiz. Is there a possibility that a MATE-friendly version of Compiz will be pushed upstream to the Debian repos?
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought MATE is compatible with Compiz? As far as anything about debian repos I think you might have better luck searching on their package search page. Or a good ole fashioned Google or DuckDuckGo search.
As Ubuntu (Mate) is based on Debian, why should it be a problem, look at the repo PPA’s in the Debian database, I’m sure it’s there somewhere?. 
You can install it directly, there are a few tips etc here:
https://wiki.debian.org/Compiz
I don’t use Debian so I cannot say how well it will work!.