Wine staging tree

[Scott Ritchie]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 9:59 PM, Roderick Colenbrander <
thunderbird2k at gmail.com> wrote:

> No matter how good the intentions are to do a better job than PlayOnLinux,
> I'm skeptical. I actually went over several of the patches in the repo and
> various of them look incorrect. I understand that they may make app Z work
> and while they may not always be as evil as PlayOnLinux-style hacks, I
> still don't want them to be out in the public. In my opinion any tainted
> Wine is bad for Wine developers. Yes, user may test your new patch, but I
> expect to get a lot of issues back due to other incomplete patches with
> side effects.
>
> In an ideal world there would be no need for your project, because all
> patches make it upstream quickly. I think the discussion should be more on
> how to get closer and closer to this situation. I think it should more be
> found in mentoring and providing more feedback.
>
> Since Wine is an open source project, nobody forbids you from working on
> your customized Wine. Providing builds to users to try it is fine with me,
> but clearly don't mark it as the official Wine, but as you already doing by
> calling it 'wine-compholio'.
>
> What does really scare me are the Fedora Wine builds. After you said that
> they incorporate your changes, I checked the rpm and indeed it uses 150+
> custom patches from your repo. In my opinion, distro packages need to be as
> vanilla as possible to prevent the PlayOnLinux-like bug rejection issues.
> Sometimes build system change or some minor change is needed, but such an
> amount of patches is not justified. Myself I don't have much time to work
> on Wine anymore these days, but if I got bugs from Fedora users, I would
> reject their bugs. I hope other Wine developers would really do the same,
> because the packages clearly can't be trusted.
>

I'll note that, in Ubuntu, I've been including a few of these
"distro-specific" patches (accepted stuff like font types) for a while, but
also the PulseAudio series of patches by Maarten Lankhorst.  The reason is
that, at the end of the day, WinePulse is needed for users (some of them
using Wine professionally), and that if I had to wait for a properly
Pulse-supporting upstream sound driver I'd be leaving a million users
hanging for 4 years counting.

That said, I don't have the skill or time to vet the random patches going
into the Wine-compholio branch, and think their separate PPA (deriving from
my packages, I believe) is a perfectly reasonable solution.  Users can try
stable Wine included with Ubuntu, then beta Wine from my PPA, then
compholio Wine if they have reason to think that might work for their app.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie
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