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

[Ove Kaaven]

Den 14. nov. 2010 00:22, skrev Austin English:
> I'd like to take over maintaining the Debian Wine packages, presumably
> with your mentoring/sponsoring.

No thanks, at least not yet. As should have been apparent if you've 
caught up, I've been ready to upload new Wine releases as soon as Debian 
gets a mingw32 compiler capable of handling wine-gecko. It's not really 
my fault Debian doesn't have it yet (though I don't have the time or 
inclination to assist much with that, either).

While help with the Wine package could be useful at some point, yet 
another person wanting to build Wine debs is the last thing that's 
needed right now (there's already a long lineup of people for that if 
that was the problem). Much more useful to work on gcc-mingw32.

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

I can handle the 64-bit issues. It was my plan to make the packages 
multiarch-capable, and I was well on my way, but then upstream had to go 
and make wine-gecko all but mandatory, thus causing the current problem.

It is my interpretation of the Debian Social Contract, Debian Policy, 
plus certain precedence-setting decisions within Debian, that installing 
a package that requires downloading a binary blob from the Internet in 
order to function acceptably and in an "upstream-supported" way, is not 
acceptable within Debian's "main" archive. (The "contrib" archive might 
allow it, at least if it could be done somewhat securely (e.g., 
verifying the blob using MD5/SHA/whatever), but then all of Wine would 
have to be moved there, and that's not really desirable.)

(And a wine-gecko deb that simply repackaged the upstream precompiled 
blob would probably be unacceptable for *both* main and contrib - 
repackaging binaries not compiled/compilable by Debian tools is 
generally only permitted in non-free.)

Therefore, wine-gecko *must* be built using Debian-provided compilers 
and wine must depend on this package, and then preferably disable the 
binary-blob-download feature if necessary. Thus, I cannot condone, much 
less sponsor, an update before this is possible.

Ove