[pkg-wine-party] Difference between Debian and WineHQ package.

Jens Reyer jre.winesim at gmail.com
Sat Jan 27 23:42:20 UTC 2018


On 01/27/2018 11:43 PM, Floris wrote:
> Dear Debian Wine maintainers,
> 
> Maybe a simple question:
> Is there a difference between the Debian Wine Packages and the Wine
> Packages from WineHQ [1]? The upstream packages seams to run without
> problems.

Yeah, providing packages which do not run would indeed be a shame, and
I'm really happy that this isn't the case for neither Debian nor Winehq
packages.

[My info about Winehq packages might be outdated, please contact me if
I'm wrong.]

Quick, but still too long list:

Debian completely builds from source, Winehq uses some pre-generated
files (which they most probably generated themselves, so I have no
concern about their freeness).

Winehq packages are available only for i386 and amd64, Debian's also for
arm and powerpc architectures, hurd and kfreebsd debian ports.

winehq packages are kind of monolithic (wine, wine-i386, wine-amd64),
while Debian distributes contents to several packages.

Winehq packages put their files in /opt (where they correctly belong as
addons per FHS), while Debian's are wherever they belong regularly per
FHS.  Therefore different winehq flavors just may be installed to
different /opt subfolders, while we change file names for different
flavors by adding suffixes.

The commands (e.g. "wine") are on PATH via the alternative system in
Debian (allowing to coinstall several Wine flavors), for winehq atm you
have to install the winehq-... compat packages which conflict with
alternative Wine flavors. (I'm working on getting the alternatives
system upstream.)

Our flavors: stable and development
Winehq flavors: stable, devel and staging

Debian packages are in the Debian archive, Winehq needs to be added to
your system first.

The appdata for e.g. graphical installation of Wine from the Gnome
Software center is only available in our packages atm (I'm working on
getting that upstream), and only Debian runs an generator for this to
actually work.

I don't know if winehq uses the same compiler and flags as Debian does.

As of 3.0 I think Debian and Winehq have the same
features/build-dependencies, and generate their runtime dependencies
automatically.

Debian packages disable the system integration of common file extensions
(e.g. txt to notepad association).  That's the only reason I can think
of atm why I'd generally advise against the winehq packages.

Debian provides source packages via deb-src, winehq afaik not.

Generally both projects are quite fast in providing packages after a
release, but both fail to do so from time to time.

Debian provides packages primarily for unstable/testing and additionally
backports for stable, winehq seems to provide for oldoldstable,
oldstable, stable, testing and sid (actually atm every winehq "Packages"
file is 0 bytes, so they might not be providing any package at all atm).

And probably much more things, and for sure much details.

Greets
jre



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