[needs-packaging] wine staging

[Michael Müller]

Wine Staging is a special Wine version containing various bug fixes and features, which are not yet available in regular wine versions (and for some of them this will probably never be the case). This includes a lot of additional features, over 200 bugfixes, fixes for upstream regressions and so on. All these changes are split into over 600 patches. The project was founded over a year ago as an response for the slow patch acceptance policy of upstream Wine.

Several arguments why Ubuntu should consider providing packages for it:

* Debian in general doesn't seem to have a high interest in providing up-to-date and working Wine versions. Debian Sid for example is 10 versions behind upstream, other Debian distributions are even more outdated and for example only provide packages for the "stable" version (which is over a year old). Ubuntu could fill this market gap ... ;)

* Fedora already replaced their default Wine version with Wine Staging, a couple of other distros like Gentoo or FreeBSD also have support for Wine-Staging in their official repositories.

* PlayOnLinux also offers Wine-Staging builds, though these are precompiled versions which might have dependency problems for some users. Moreover, there are also users who prefer using Wine directly, without having to use POL.

* It is required as a dependency of Pipelight, a wrapper to run Windows plugins directly in Linux browsers.

* Frequently requested features like CSMT (commandstream multithreading, for better graphic performance) or CUDA/PhysX are supported out of the box.

* We have a good cooperation with the Winetricks and the ReactOS team.

URL: https://wine-staging.com/
License: LGPL-2.1 (+ some other licenses required for some font files only, which are optional)
Notes: I am one of the developers of the project, and we would be fine with doing most of the packaging tasks, when it is accepted. We already have a PPA containing packages at https://launchpad.net/~pipelight/+archive/ubuntu/stable and are currently improving our packaging files. At the moment the package for example installs to /opt/ but we are happy to change this in order to get into the official repository.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

*** This is an automated message ***

This bug is tagged needs-packaging which identifies it as a request for a new package in Ubuntu. As a part of the managing needs-packaging bug reports specification, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Specs/NeedsPackagingBugs, all needs-packaging bug reports have Wishlist importance. Subsequently, I'm setting this bug's status to Wishlist.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)]

Ubuntu's wine packages come from Debian now, so I encourage you to discuss this with the Debian maintainers of wine.