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

[Kyle Auble]

On 07/26/2015 07:54 PM, jre wrote:
> 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).

I saw that you did the patches to make the two wine packages 
co-installable; that's impressive work. I'm just starting to learn about 
the details of how Debian works internally, but I've read about some of 
the basics. I was also aware of Backports because I used it to grab a 
package that wasn't in Stable for the brief time I was on Wheezy. I 
don't have the experience (or computational resources) to be a 
maintainer at this point, but I'd like to learn more and maybe submit 
some patches.

> For now I also subscribed to wine-devel. I'll try to (help) improve the Debian documentation at winehq.

I just redid the Debian page on the WineWiki at 
http://wiki.winehq.org/Debian so you should have something up-to-date to 
start from.

> 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...

OK, that makes sense. I just figured it would be simpler to tweak fixes 
for the older environment, as they came in, than to reach back and apply 
patches to an older code-base too. I have very little experience with 
Debian packaging though so that was amateur hypothesizing.

> ... and there's no reason to keep it out of there.

I understand. I mainly thought of moving wine-development out of Stable 
because I saw that wine-unstable was kept out. The only tiny advantage I 
can imagine is that it might be less confusing for users that just want 
to install the newest development release. They would have to enable 
Backports either way, but I expect that a few people will inevitably try 
the version from the Stable repo someday, then get upset that the 
default option isn't right. It's the kind of thing that's outweighed by 
any advantage to keeping wine-development in Stable.

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

In that case, having it in Stable too sounds like the way to go. Getting 
an up-to-date development release back-ported is the real prize.

Cheers,
Kyle