Questions on WINE releases and stability

[Jerome Leclanche]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 6:54 PM,  <louis at museresearch.com> wrote:
> - It's my understanding that the stable branch only has select features
> and patches ported over (from the wiki: "..with only minimal changes
> merged in").  Would this mean that if I compared a stable release with a
> development release from around the same time that the two releases would
> have significant differences?  Specifically, I'm wondering about 1.2.3 vs.
> 1.3.15.

Development releases of wine tend to be a *lot* more mature in every
aspect than their stable counterparts.

Minor stable releases get a few hundred either important or
easily-rebased patches each ported over from the development releases.
It slightly helps keeping them up to date. The goal of stable releases
is to have as few regressions as possible.

Keep in mind, for a piece of software like Wine, it doesn't make as
much sense. 99% of Wine's development goes into implementing missing
APIs or API details. Almost all of the time, this causes relevant
broken apps to work better.

"Stable releases" are more of a bureaucracy issue. Wine was without
stable releases for some 15-ish years and was doing just fine, but
FWIU it annoyed many distributions.
In general, if you don't want regressions, pick a recent development
release that works for you and stick to it. 64-bit support is
certainly better in 1.3.25 (current dev release), but that doesn't
necessarily mean the bits of 64-bit support you need are not already
in 1.2.3.

If you have testcases for your program, run them under Wine and see
which one fares best. Added bonus is you can upgrade every few
development releases and run the testcases again to see if there are
regressions (and if there are, please do report them on
http://bugs.winehq.org).

--
J. Leclanche