Changes for Wine on Debian

[Jens Reyer]

Disclaimer: I talk about the state of Wine in Debian on a best effort
basis. I am involved in packaging, but I am not the maintainer. My
opinion is not authorative.


On 09/18/2015 10:29 PM, Vincent Povirk wrote:
>>> - 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).
>>
>> Also a pita for people who advise typing things like 'wineserver -k'?
>> Are they really supposed to know to look in this directory?
>>
>> Why is it in an arch-specific subdirectory when wineserver is designed
>> to be architecture independent (same interface, and potentially the
>> same server instance, used with 32-bit and 64-bit clients)?
> 
> Er, sorry, I missed the part where you were describing the current
> state and not necessarily advocating for it. Never mind.

Np :)
Is this true also without WoW64? I thought not (please tell me
otherwise). So on a 64-bit system we need both the 32-bit and the 64-bit
server installed. So currently I can't think of a better solution,
because we don't have WoW64 yet.


> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Jens Reyer <jre.winesim at gmail.com> wrote:
>> - Download of gecko and mono packages is disabled.
> 
> Doesn't keeping it (so that the wine package downloads a binary blob
> not built by Debian) violate their principles?

Maybe a misunderstanding (I used packages confusingly): Indeed Debian
disables the download of the mono and gecko *binary blobs*. Downloading
them wouldn't fit Debian's policy  and definition of free software.
I doubt we will change that (this would probably mean moving wine from
the "main" repository to official-inofficial "contrib"). Therefore
changing that at its root is "not possible".

Instead Debian provides gecko packages directly. Unfortunately they
aren't updated regularly enough, so atm you can only use them for wine
stable.

That leaves you with downloading gecko and mono manually and placing
them in the correct folder. ... which is broken for gecko currently
(https://bugs.debian.org/783428).
Imo our TODO is to fix the latter and communicate instructions better to
the user.

btw: for the same "political" reasons Debian disables the download of
the Khronos XML API Registry for building wine. Instead khronos-api was
packaged especially for this and is now a part of Debian.

Greets
jre