Changes for Wine on Debian

[Jens Reyer]

On 09/10/2015 01:48 AM, Kyle Auble wrote:
> 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 Jessie is outdated by almost a year now.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.

Hi,

I'm said person doing the backports and other stuff at Wine-Debian.

So the current wine development version is now regularly updated in the
backports suite for Debian stable, yay!

Thanks for bringing this up at Debian directly, Kyle. Wine and Debian
will win by being closer together and talking directly, here and there.
(I'll try to answer more promptly *here* in the future, as well as I
will help on the wiki here.)

I don't worry too much about the backports being hit by the pre-release
freeze. This is only the standard procedure, and I think we can convince
Debian's backports admins to make an exception in about 14 months when
the next freeze starts.


Now, for all those wondering about the *usefulness of wine stable*: yes,
please!
I see the need and usefulness of wine-development for many people, and
therefore I promised to maintain them in backports at least for Debian
Jessie (i.e. probably the next 2 years).
But this is only an additional service for users who have a reason to
leave the stable path of their system. The occasional user is happy to
know that Wine exists and that it works for an awesome lot of
applications (and will do so for the next time, because neither the
system or wine will change frequently). I'm sure they are the vast, but
silent, majority.


FYI, the imo *main differences of wine-development in Debian*
(unfortunately they exist, but we're working on removing them if possible):

- You need a suffix "-development" for the commands themselves, e.g.
wine-development, winecfg-development, ... . I saw some confusion about
this here at winehq, so for now: yes, these commands exist and work
fine. And yes, hopefully soon we will make wine-development working also
with unsuffixed command names. (https://bugs.debian.org/758291)

- WoW64 is not supported, yet. Instead separate prefixes ~/.wine and
~/.wine64 are used automatically unless specified otherwise.
(https://bugs.debian.org/762058).

- wineserver is not in PATH but in an arch specific subdirectory in
/usr/lib (works flawlessly for plain wine, but is a pita for 3rd party
stuff like winetricks and PlayOnLinux).

- Download of gecko and mono packages is disabled.

- wine-development is currently built without capi, hal, gphoto,
gstreamer, sane and v4l.


Greets
jre (Jens Reyer)