How to include a part of Wine ... why include wine at all?

[Daniel Hollocher]

I have a different but related question:  why is a wine package included in
the Ubuntu repositories at all?

Its 5 months old, and the winehq website not only has a package built
specifically for ubuntu gutsy/whatever, but they have their own repository
that will allow your install of wine to be automatically updated.

I understand that much of ubuntu software is upgraded on a 6 month basis to
ensure compatibility, but why include wine in that process when the wine
devs are probably doing a better job?

Dan

PS - I'm very curious to the response, since I feel that similar criticisms
can be leveled at other packages in the ubuntu repos.


On Feb 11, 2008 7:49 PM, Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org> wrote:

> Wine uses the Gecko rendering engine for functionality in its fake
> internet explorer, which is needed by a lot of applications.  Wine can't
> just use the system Gecko that Firefox does, however - it needs to use
> the Windows version of Gecko.
>
> This presents a problem, since windows Gecko can't compile on Linux and
> Wine can't bundle it upstream.
>
> Currently, Wine gets the Gecko engine the first time it needs to be used
> by downloading it over the internet.  This has all sorts of problems;
> sometimes the download fails, sometimes the user doesn't have internet,
> different users have to download it multiple times since it isn't
> system-wide, and the user gets burden with all this confusion.
>
>
> Wine does, however, support simply using a local copy of the gecko
> engine rather than downloading it.  All we have to do is put it in a
> specific place on the filesystem.
>
> Ideally, Windows Gecko would be buildable under the tools we already
> have in Ubuntu (Mingw), then we could make a wine-gecko package fairly
> easily that just put gecko in its place.  Unfortunately, that's not the
> case today: the Gecko that Wine needs has to be built with Visual Studio.
>
>
> So, what's the best way to do this?  Put the file that Wine downloads
> anyway into a wine-gecko package, and put that on the local filesystem?
>  What do we do about LGPL compliance and providing source code?
>
> I've opened a bug to track integration:
> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/191132
>
> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie
>
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-- 
In science and in mind, the impossible and the hasn't-happened-yet are
indistinguishable.
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