The Wine maintenance release 6.0.4 is now available upstream. https://www.winehq.org/news/2022041201 Why do we have only mostly development Wine versions in the tree?
Hi, We only keep the current stable version and last few development versions in tree. As per winehq.org: Stable: Wine 7.0 (shortlog) Development:Wine 7.17 (shortlog) So 6.0 is too old and not supported anymore. Thanks, Sarnex
fwiw 6.0.4 is more recent than 7.0 and should be in a good state, although I agree keeping too many branches gets messy and hard to maintain (many older branches are broken with gcc11 and newer glibc for example, and we'd need to patch them), unless there's a specific reason it's needed like a major regression.
I would prefer 6.0.4 maintenance release for Wine instead of any development version in the tree as well as 1st 7.0 development version marked as first stable version by upstream. Maintenance release includes many bug fixes unlike first 7.0 stable version: https://www.winehq.org/announce/6.0.4 It's strange for me to have every development version of Wine in the tree and 0 (zero) maintenance versions. It's the same as to have a lot of Chromium development and beta versions and no stable ones. And it's also the same as to have many Nightly, Beta and Rapid Release Firefox versions and no any Firefox Extended Support Release version.
In a way I agree and will probably keep 7.0.x in-tree for a long time because of that, or at least until 8.0 is out /and/ is getting its own maintenance releases. So you can expect to see both stable 7.0.x and 8.0 exist together in the future. However, I'd rather not bring 6.x back as it had some more fundamental differences on how certain libraries were handled (for PE files), and would rather not update the ebuild to handle this and maintain it (nor use the old 6.0.2 rather messy ebuild for this). Could reconsider if there's a major regression that require 6.0.x for something and doesn't work on any other versions currently. On another note, we don't really keep many development versions either. These were just pending to be cleaned up (gone now). Wine development is a lot more stable nowadays, and I don't feel we need to keep a million versions.
(In reply to Ionen Wolkens from comment #4) > In a way I agree and will probably keep 7.0.x in-tree for a long time > because of that, or at least until 8.0 is out /and/ is getting its own > maintenance releases. > > So you can expect to see both stable 7.0.x and 8.0 exist together in the > future. Not to say it may not be dropped if maintenance releases aren't happening and there's issues (e.g. a lot of older wine versions are broken with current toolchain, we don't necessarily want to keep these on life support by ourselves).
Just to add to Ionen's comments, we had an informal discussion on this internally and decided to not package 6.0.x again because of the reasons above, but we emailed the Wine developers asking them to do a new stable release of 7.0 to include fixes that exist in 6.0.x stable but not 7.0.x stable
