[pkg-wine-party] Bug#793551: wine-development: Consider providing through Backports instead of Stable

[Kyle Auble]

Source: wine-development
Version: 1.7.29-4
Severity: wishlist

Hello,

Upstream at the wine developers' mailing list, we recently had a
conversation about the wine & wine-development packages. There was some
confusion at first about what wine-development was for, but we've
worked that out. You can read the whole thread, starting here:
https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2015-July/108513.html

It's great to have an official Debian package of wine's development
release that can live happily alongside the stable one. Kudos to
everyone that put in the hard work to make that happen.

However, I would like to propose, in the future, providing
wine-development (and all the other -development packages) to Stable
through Backports, instead of the Stable repo proper. The version of
wine-development in Jessie is 1.7.29, which was released last October.
Especially with a code-base that's still as fluid as wine's, that
mostly defeats the purpose of a development release.

Won't a version that lacks upstream's guarantee of stability, but falls
out of step with current work, also contradict the goals of Debian
Stable some and be harder to maintain? My gut feeling is that offering
Testing's version of wine-development through Backports would be better
for everyone. It would confuse end users less, keep clearer boundaries
between Stable & Testing, and simplify things for the Debian wine team.

Cheers,
Kyle


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.1
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)