Development vs stable series [LWN.net]

Development vs stable series

Posted Nov 19, 2009 16:04 UTC (Thu) by mstefani (guest, #31644)
In reply to: Development vs stable series by epa
Parent article: Wine 1.1.33 announced

Wine stable is still in use: According to Scott Ritchie, the Wine packager for Ubuntu, about 90% of the Ubuntu Wine users use wine-1.0.1.
EPEL for RHEL5 has wine-1.0.1 too.

Why is it odd that Wine uses that scheme? While the Wine project has some similarities to the Linux Kernel it is fundamentally different in other aspects.

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Development vs stable series

Posted Nov 19, 2009 19:46 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

I think because Wine by its nature will need a steady stream of updates to
cope with the latest APIs and applications (not to mention newly discovered
bug-compatibility fixes and obscure behaviours of existing APIs), a 'rolling
stable' release policy might make more sense.

OTOH if you have some Windows app that happens to work with Wine 1.0.x, you
certainly don't want to see it break or change behaviour (even if the new
behaviour has a 70% chance of being an improvement) without warning. So I
can see both sides of the argument.

Development vs stable series

Posted Nov 20, 2009 3:05 UTC (Fri) by mstefani (guest, #31644) [Link]

Right, but if you *need* an application working and it works fine (good enough that you get your job done) with wine-1.0.1 why do you want to upgrade Wine for that app? Definitely not because the game you just bought needs the latest and greatest Wine snapshot from the git tree.

That's one of the fundamental differences between Wine and Linux: you can run fairly easy(*) multiple Wine instances/versions in parallel without them stomping on each others feet. There is no trade-off to be made between "use the latest kernel that supports my builtin WLAN card but breaks my X" and "have a stable X but use an extra USB WLAN card".

(*) Basically use a separate WINEPREFIX for the app and install Wine into that too. Finish it off with a short shell script that sets the PATH and WINEPREFIX environment and the job is done.