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

[jre]

On 07/25/2015 02:10 AM, Kyle Auble wrote:
> 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.

First off, yes, the current upstream version via backports would be
nice. Now I'm seriously thinking about doing wine-development backports
for Jessie's lifespan if I find a sponsor (I'm not a Debian Developer or
Maintainer).

Mike, Stephen, what do you think?

For now I updated https://wiki.debian.org/Wine, which didn't mention
wine-development previously (but still without mentioning backports or
explicitly stating that wine-development is not updated in stable). For
now I also subscribed to wine-devel. I'll try to (help) improve the
Debian documentation at winehq.

A rough description how Debian releases work:
Packages get uploaded to "unstable" first. If they are free of major
bugs they migrate to "testing" after a few days. About every two years
"testing" becomes "stable" after going through a freeze period of about
half a year (the time spans are not fixed, they last as long as necessary).

So it's either testing and stable, or none of them.

For wine(-development) in *stable* I'd say the focus is on not breaking
things for the user (so no new versions, only bug fixes), less on the
security perspective. So it isn't that hard to maintain wine-development
in stable and there's no reason to keep it out of there.

wine-development not in stable would make the backport even harder or
just impossible to be accepted.

Greets
jre