[pkg-wine-party] Bug#585409: wine 1.2/1.3 on Debian: what's the blocker?

[Stephen Kitt]

Hi Antoine,

On Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:33:07 -0500, Antoine Beaupré <anarcat at debian.org>
wrote:
> It seems we are still without 1.2 in Debian. While I understand this is
> a difficult project, after reading through the history of this bug here,
> it seems to me that the package *may* ready to be uploaded...
> 
> So what's the blocker here? Stephen - do you need a sponsor for this
> package?

The blocker's effectively Ove - after I did what was necessary to get
wine-gecko into Debian (with a sourceful rebuild, not just repackaging
upstream's binaries) I was hoping Wine uploads would resume and we'd catch up
with upstream within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately only four releases
followed, packaging three upstream versions (1.1.33 to 1.1.35 inclusive), and
since August there hasn't been any activity, including in the git repository.

Ove's reason for uploading every single version of Wine is so that all
versions of Wine end up available in the Debian snapshots archive, which can
come in handy given that some Windows programs work better with older
versions of Wine. It also means changes to the contents of Wine releases and
packaging requirements can be made progressively.

Unfortunately we're so far behind now that even with one release a day it
would take a month and a half to catch up (10 remaining 1.1.x versions, 7 1.2
release candidates, 4 1.2.x versions and 34 1.3.x versions), not counting
updating wine-gecko, and the effort involved seems enormous to me - at least
I don't have the time and energy for that.

What I can do though is update my Wine 1.2.x packages (see
http://www.sk2.org/wine/wine_1.2.3-0.1.dsc for the current source) to use
wine-gecko-unstable as it ended up in Debian - although I'd rather name the
latter wine-gecko-1.0.0 (as used in my packages) since having wine ("-stable")
depend on wine-gecko-unstable is a bit unfortunate. It would be nice if the
existing packaging team on Alioth could be extended, but I don't know whether
that's possible without Ove's approval (or an Alioth administrator's
intervention). I've had offers of sponsorship in the past, but if you're up
for it (or Hilko) I'd appreciate it. (But don't just sponsor the existing
packages mentioned above!)

The next step, assuming we skip all the intervening unstable versions, would
be to update wine-gecko (which is going to be a whole new bundle of fun given
the changes since 1.0.0) and package Wine 1.3.33.

> I also have concerns about the fork between this package and the Ubuntu
> ones. Ending the fork could quickly bring Wine 1.2 and 1.3 in Debian. I
> bring up those concerns in a separate bug report (#649238).

I should really reply in detail to your separate bug report, but apart from
the sound drivers I don't have any objection to merging all the binary
packages back together. As far as taking Ubuntu's packaging is concerned, I
haven't looked at it in detail; I'm not sure though that the wine-gecko
packaging would be acceptable for Debian since it doesn't build from the
provided source.

Regards,

Stephen
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