[pkg-wine-party] Debian wine package maintenance / debian bug 479659

[Stephen Kitt]

Hi Austin,

On Sat, 13 Nov 2010 15:22:41 -0800, Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I've seen quite a few people asking for Wine on Debian recently. I've
> read up on http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=479659, as
> well as a few other pages. I got your git repository from
> http://pkg-wine.alioth.debian.org/, and after a bit of setup, got it
> to compile the 1.1.33 debs.
> 
> I'd like to take over maintaining the Debian Wine packages, presumably
> with your mentoring/sponsoring.

Please see also the various bugs regarding new upstream versions of Wine
(http://bugs.debian.org/557783 and http://bugs.debian.org/585409), others
have been working behind the scenes too. Of course the more the merrier, and
since you're involved in the upstream Wine community we're better off with
you on board!

> If so, we can get started and get debian wine up to date :-).

I've got the basics up on http://www.sk2.org/wine, up to version 1.2. I
discussed the situation with Ove a while back, just after Squeeze froze, and
so far the plan is as follows:
1. Get wine-gecko into Debian; this involves:
1a. Update the binutils and gcc packages for MinGW-w64.
1b. Update the version of MinGW-w64.
2. Update wine and wine-unstable.

It would also be interesting to get wine-mono in...

(1a) is currently in progress, see http://bugs.debian.org/602996 and
http://bugs.debian.org/602997. The current packages are in git on alioth, see
http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/gcc-mingw-w64.git and
http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/binutils-mingw-w64.git. This also
involves discussions with Ron, the maintainer of the mingw32 toolchain in
Debian, which are ongoing. Note too that the gcc package is currently blocked
by a bug in gcc-4.5-source.

(1b) is also in progress, see http://bugs.debian.org/594371; I haven't
uploaded my packaging of mingw-w64 yet. I'll hopefully find time to do it
this week.

(1) itself involves small changes compared to my packages on
http://www.sk2.org/wine, to build with newer versions of MinGW-w64; I've
already made the changes but haven't uploaded them yet.

(2) is fairly straightforward based on Ove's packages. I do know though that
Ove intended to update the packaging somewhat, but there wasn't much hurry
given (1).

> A few starting questions:
> Do I need a 64-bit debian machine to make the build, or will it be
> enough to make the 32-bit packages and have the build bots take care
> of 64 bit.

If you want to get the support for 64-bit Windows working, you'll need a
64-bit machine. I haven't started work on this at all yet.

> Same for old debian versions, will the build bots take care of this?

Packaging work for Debian main usually targets unstable or experimental.
Since wine-gecko needs gcc 4.5, which is currently only in experimental, it
has to target experimental too; if wine's dependency on wine-gecko is strong
(as Ove wishes it to be), wine will have to target experimental also. I guess
once Squeeze releases gcc 4.5 will move to unstable and everything else can
follow.

This complicates the situation with regards to backports, which have to be
managed explicitly in any case.

> Should my first 'real' package be 1.1.34, or 1.2?

Historically Ove uploaded all versions of Wine successively, based on the
idea that a specific version of Wine may be useful to someone and hence it
is useful to have them all on http://snapshot.debian.org. Given how old Wine
1.1.33 is, I don't know if it's worth still doing that, or if we should go
straight to 1.2 (or even 1.2.1).

> I also noticed that wine --version reports wine-1.1.33-359-g680678e,
> e.g., it's reporting the git sha1, rather than wine-1.1.33 or
> wine-1.1.33-debian1 or something. The package is named correctly, just
> wine is screwing it up...Has this always been a problem, or did I do
> something wrong?

I have no idea, I haven't checked this at all... My wine package reports
wine-1.2.

Regards,

Stephen