[pkg-wine-party] A more basic wine-unstable package for Testing?

David Smith sidicas2 at gmail.com
Thu Apr 24 15:00:27 UTC 2014


The problem that I keep having over and over with wine on Debian is that
new games come out for Windows and within 3 weeks to a month the wine
devs have got it running on the latest bleeding edge versions of wine.

Those bleeding edge versions of wine eventually make their way into the
wine-unstable package.  But the wine-unstable package targets Debian
unstable only.   So I don't actually get the chance to play it until a
solid year or two later.

Now I do all my linux gaming on Debian stable and that works just great.
So it seems silly to me that I would have to upgrade my entire OS just
to run an unstable version of wine which provides the option to run a
handful of bleeding edge games.

At first I started working on backporting the wine-unstable package to
Wheezy just to see if it was possible.  But then I ran into the problem
of needing to backport a bunch of other packages (SANE lib, libgphoto2,
OpenCL, LDAP, CAPI, CUPS, etc.).. Which really aren't needed for gaming.

So then I figured maybe it would be better to try to create a new wine
package that was more minimal but newer.   I just called it
"wine-gaming".  I started working on that but then I realized somebody
had already done this for Debian Stable and had a package they were
posting on the Internet that installed wine 1.7.17 to /opt on a Debian
Stable system.  I'll refrain from posting the link because I'm not sure
that website is particularly credible but it can be found with a google
search.

But really, it seems like a good idea to me.  I don't run wine very
often and I only use it for gaming.  Would it not make sense to have a
wine-gaming package that was basically wine-unstable but with less
build-deps to make it easier to backport and targeted at Debian Testing
& Debian backports?

But then I guess it would eventually end up in Debian Stable and of
course any bleeding edge version of wine probably doesn't belong
there... But it would sure be nice if I get an unstable version of wine
that was packaged for Debian Stable.  You know what I mean?

Unless I'm missing something, the only way to get wine-unstable on your
system is to run Debian unstable.  I'd think most gamers would prefer as
stable of a system as possible so on the one hand they want to avoid
debian unstable, but when it comes to wine they really have no choice
but to run the wine-unstable version. 

In a way it feels like no matter what they do there just isn't a good
solution for these users.

I guess you could say the best solution is to just use 3rd party repos. 
Maybe that is true, but I'm not sure if I want to put a lot of trust in
3rd party repos and was wondering if anybody had any better ideas?

-David






More information about the pkg-wine-party mailing list