[website] Update Debian downloads info (Resend)

[Kyle Auble]

Sorry for the goofy formatting. One day Thunderbird doesn't wrap 
anything for me, the next it's cutting my lines short. I'm resending my 
message, hopefully with better formatting this time .

On 07/23/2015 11:14 AM, Nathan Schulte wrote:
> On 07/23/2015 10:02 AM, Rosanne DiMesio wrote:
>> Now, the problem with what you changed it to is that it now points to 
>> the page for Debian Jessie (stable), which has outdated packages, and 
>> doesn't show the packages for Stretch (testing) or Sid (unstable).  
>> My patch linked to 
>> https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=wine-development because 
>> the search results produce links to all three, which I think is 
>> easiest for users.
>
> What's the difference between the Stable and the Development releases 
> of Wine?  Given this thread of discussion, it seems the Wine team 
> expects users to be using the Development release, not the Stable 
> release.  If that's the case, why even bother with Stable?  Perhaps 
> this is just a terminology thing; should Debian's wine package be 
> packaging the Development release? 

I migrated to Debian Stable within the past year (still think Ubuntu's 
great, just a minimalist that wanted to wander a bit upstream). If I 
understand everything, I think the main reason the wine team still 
bothers with a stable release is for distros like Debian Stable or 
Redhat. The slower-moving distros put a much heavier emphasis on 
testing; at the end of the day, they would rather package a version of 
wine that they can certify works ok, rather than one that works great in 
isolation but causes Gnome or dbus to explode.

On 07/23/2015 10:02 AM, Rosanne DiMesio wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Jul 2015 09:10:42 -0500 Jeremy Newman 
> <jnewman at codeweavers.com> wrote:
>> I misunderstood the package. I thought it was just a meta package to
>> install required development libs, like build-essential.
>
> I understand why you thought that. It's the very reason I could never 
> find the packages by googling "Debian wine," and probably the main 
> reason Debian users can't find them either. 

I've actually been using the Debian package site a lot recently, and I 
had a similar impression to Jeremy's. I kept seeing wine-development, 
but I figured it contained headers (like most of the -dev packages) for 
compiling against libwine or something.

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Rosanne DiMesio 
<dimesio at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Jul 2015 10:14:38 -0500
> Jeremy Newman<jnewman at codeweavers.com>  wrote:
>> This is the root of the issue. How do Debian Stable users get the latest
>> version of Wine that is built specifically for them?
>
> AFAICT, they don't. Debian seems to only build the latest version for 
> testing and unstable. 

Rosanne's right about the Debian repo, which means if you want to test 
the freshest wine on Debian Stable, you or someone else has to build it 
for you. Sure enough, that's exactly what I've been trying to figure out 
in my free time (and redo related pages on the wiki in the process). If 
you use chroot or LXC, it's tedious but pretty straight forward, but I'm 
trying to figure out precisely which wine dependencies still aren't 
multi-arch compatible.

IIUC, the funny thing about Debian is when they simultaneously took 
their leap of faith from ia32-libs and resisted the RPM "heresy" of just 
letting i386 and amd64 packages mingle freely, they made it *really* 
tricky to do things like build WoW64-wine without a chroot. However, the 
second all of wine's build-dependencies become multi-arch compatible, it 
*should* become very easy. In the long run, I think if we could go 
upstream and sort out architecture issues in wine's dependencies, that 
would give much bigger rewards.

Having a package of the development release definitely doesn't hurt 
though. One immediate way it helps is you can use apt-get build-dep 
without surprises. For example, the wine package on Jessie was still 
built with libgstreamer-0.10 libraries (which throw an error when you 
attempt a multi-arch build), but since then, the Debian packagers 
flirted with libgstreamer-1.0, then decided to drop it until it becomes 
more mature.

I wonder though why the maintainers went with a separate 
wine-development package instead of just pointing the wine package in 
testing & unstable to the development release, then offering that to 
stable through Backports.

- Kyle