Call to all packagers (especially Debian)

[Scott Ritchie]

On Sat, 2006-11-25 at 19:36 -0700, Vitaliy Margolen wrote:
> It seems there is no end to how far will packagers go to brake Wine by
> trying to make it better
> 
> I thought it's been fixed a long time ago, but it seems not. Wine
> packages for Debian split important Wine parts into separate packages:
> - wine - fonts, few not essential programs, symlinks and _premade_
>   content of ~/.wine directory (with ~/.wine/c as default c: drive)!!!
> - libwine - all the builtin dlls
> - wine-utils:(explorer, winecfg, winepath, cmd.exe, iexplore, winedbg)
> and many other packages. Also as default it's using "winelauncher"
> instead of standard "wine" binary. That makes it that much more
> complicated to troubleshoot any problems that users might have.
> 
> So in case anyone having problems with Debian or Debian based distro,
> please check that all the "*wine*" packages installed. Also is there a
> way we can request packagers to follow some standard to how they package
> Wine?
> 
> Can we ask packagers to package all parts of Wine into one single
> package? If they prefer, they can package optional sound drivers
> separately (arts, esd, jack, nas). Same for documentation, and
> development headers. However everything else is essential to Wine and
> most programs that ran under it.
> 
> Also can packagers keep default method of starting Wine the same without
> using any additional scripts for starting Wine?
> 
> And of course, if any alterations has been made, state so in the distro
> specific readme file.
> 
> 
> Of course I realize that this is open source and anyone can do whatever
> they pleased. But please, that's make it more supportable. It's such a
> huge PITA to waste several hours trying to find the reason why something
> doesn't work to realize that person doesn't have explorer. Needless to
> say that lots of things won't work right.
> 
> Vitaliy.

This is precisely why I started making the packages myself (that and
they were always about 3 months out of date in Debian).

I tried to get my packages put into Debian but after investing about 20
hours of work into it simply gave up.  I ran into a huge wall of
Debian-orchestrated bureaucracy: the packages are split in this broken
way as "policy", I need to file a separate bug report against the
package for each application that breaks (and each debian-specific
change that does no good), nobody could upload my current version of the
package since only the official maintainer can make a non-security fix,
and all sorts of other needless headaches.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, accepted my packages with open arms.  So now
I run and package for Ubuntu, and from what I hear my packages work on
Debian.

Really, we should set up a wiki or web page for Debian users telling
them the whole story.  As you've noticed, it really is annoying
troubleshooting this issue when it's so frequently Debian's fault and
there's nothing we can do about it other than tell users that Debian is
messed up.  I'd really hate to have to go back to the days where we told
users to compile Wine themselves.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie