Comment 56 for bug 1530229

>Thanks Bryan! The patch seems reasonable.
Thanks!

>If the Ubuntu Wine team is starting to be stagnant, would there be a point to merge with Debian to drop Ubuntu's wine1.x source packages and use Debian's wine source package as is or as much as is as possible?

I think that might be the better option at this point (or for 16.10?) and I did try my hand at it. There are two bugs about moving to 1.8:
1558480 - Just go to debian packaging, see Marc's comment #2 for why it's difficult - upgrades. It's a cross-architecture upgrade story which I wasn't able to figure out.

1556344 - Add wine1.8 with Ubuntu packaging.