Changes for Wine on Debian

[Kyle Auble]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to update you all on the state of the Wine packages for 
Debian; back in July, the difference between the "wine-development" and 
"wine" packages came up, not to mention which version WineHQ's download 
page should actually point to. Although it's fresher than the stable 
release of Wine, the default version of the wine-development package in 
Jessie is outdated by almost a year now.

Over the past couple of months though, Jens Reyer worked with the Debian 
wine packaging team on backporting an up-to-date version of 
wine-development for Jessie. That Jessie-Backports package became 
available right around the beginning of September so now there's a 
curated way for users on Debian Stable to track the upstream development 
releases. IIUC, the Backports version tracks the package in Testing so 
it will still fall behind some while Testing is in a code-freeze, but 
it's a good compromise with Debian's goals, plus the policy for 
Backports is that they should only track Unstable for critical reasons.

When closing out my bug report, Jens mentioned that upgrading the 
wine-development packages directly from the Jessie version to 
Jessie-Backports still may take some manual tweaking, though he's 
working on resolving that. He also recommended that instead of having 
the WineHQ download page link to...
https://packages.debian.org/stable/wine-development
we aim the link at the list of all living versions of the 
wine-development package:
https://packages.debian.org/wine-development
He also suggested that if it doesn't cause problems, we keep a link to 
the stable release package, just in case someone prefers it (or they're 
still stuck on oldstable):
https://packages.debian.org/wine
I can probably squeeze in some time in the next few days to submit those 
changes myself.

- Kyle