[08:12] <dholbach> good morning
[21:14] <slackner> Hello, i am one of the developers of wine-staging, and I have some questions regarding packaging it for Ubuntu. For those who are not aware what it is, it is an improved version of upstream Wine with many included extra features (performance improvements, bugfixes, new features) which exists since about over a year, see https://wine-staging.com/ for more details.
[21:15] <slackner> I know that packages of forks usually don't get accepted, but we are talking about over 200 fixed bugs and more than 600 patches, so this is not any abritary fork. Fedora is also shipping wine staging since about half a year ago, though the dumped their regular wine version in favor of wine staging.
[21:15] <slackner> Debian/Ubuntu packaging files are already available, and we're also providing packages in our third party repos, but we think it would be even more awesome to get it into the official Ubuntu repositories. Thats why I am asking here. Is there a chance to do that? We could also maintain it (well, we are doing it anyway), but having it in the official repositories will reach more users. ;)
[21:21] <Noskcaj> slackner, You'll probably want to file a debian ITP bug, and maybe make a PPA for ubuntu
[21:21] <Noskcaj> It's too late for this to be in vivid or debian jessie, so you've got a few months before any deadlines for vivid+1 appear
[21:26] <slackner> Noskcaj: i see no big chances that debian will accept it, as far as i know they try to avoid forks even more, and especially wine is a software where noone seems to care about. the latest available version in sid for example is 10 releases behind upstream
[21:28] <slackner> Noskcaj: and wheezy for example still contains a version, which is about two years old
[21:28] <slackner> Noskcaj: the wine project is a bit special with respect to stable/development - stable doesn't really mean it works well, or at least that bugfixes are backported, its just a snapshot from the release
[21:28] <DarkPlayer> not to forget that someone opened a debian bug to request the inclusion of pipelight (a project that depends on wine staging) without any reaction
[21:30] <Noskcaj> Try and make a ppa, and please contact the ubuntu wine maintainers and discuss this with them
[21:31] <Noskcaj> And since we're close to ubuntu release, let me know if there are any simple fixes for wine1.6 available that we can upload. ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine1.6 is our bugs list)
[21:33] <slackner> Noskcaj: we already provide a ppa, but it would really be easier for users when it is directly available in official repos. moreover, we also contacted the ubuntu wine maintainers, and they do not seem to be interested in replacing the existing version or maintaining two versions - but we would be fine with taking care of the second version of course, so no additional work for anyone else ;)
[21:34] <slackner> Noskcaj: if you mean backporting fixes for wine 1.6, thats not really a suitable solution. as mentioned, the last stable release is about a year ago
[21:35] <slackner> Noskcaj: the amount of patches would be very huge ;)
[21:37] <Noskcaj> I can't help a whole lot here, but is the a needs-packaging bug?
[21:38] <Noskcaj> And does winetricks and PoL work with wine-staging? Getting those might increase your userbase, and maybe make the ubuntu wine team more willing to share a PPA and help out
[21:38] <slackner> Noskcaj: i didn't open a bug yet, i figured i would first talk to couple of people here
[21:39] <slackner> Noskcaj: winetricks works of course, and PoL also offers wine-staging builds already (but their versions have several dependency problems, just shipping half a debian distro doesn't work well)
[21:40] <Noskcaj> fair enough. Make the bug when you have time, list reasons why we need/want wine-staging, make not of the issues you've had so far
[21:40] <slackner> Noskcaj: the dependency problems are not specific to wine-staging, its basically a PoL bug affecting all precompiled wine versions
[21:40] <Noskcaj> ok
[21:41] <Noskcaj> Could you perhaps add the current winetricks version to your PPA? The version in ubuntu needs merging from debian, but no one has done that in a while
[21:42] <slackner> Noskcaj: sure, thats not a big problem
[21:42] <Noskcaj> :)
[22:52] <micahg> slackner: you might want to get in touch with the Debian Wine team and see what their take on your fork is: https://pkg-wine.alioth.debian.org/, sometimes Debian follows forks (e.g. libav)