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

[Joe Terranova]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 7:32 PM, Daniel Hollocher
<Ubuntu-devel-discuss at openleadership.org> wrote:
> Though it is my personal judgment that the two who have responded so far
> don't truely know the answer to my question, for the sake of argument, I
> will refute what has thus been presented.

Let me see if I can give it a try then.

This is the way distributions work.

1) The distribution (Ubuntu) syncs with upstream when developing the new release
2) a) the release stays stable
  b) the programs keep developing.

For most programs, this is fine. The newest release isn't necessary.
However, for many programs, having the newest release is very
important, and breaks the standard Distro formula. Examples include:

Tor -- the upstream developers recently asked Ubuntu to remove Tor
from their repositories, as older versions are hurting the network
Games -- if you're running version 1.2.1, and all the servers are
running version 1.2.3, you usually can't play
Wine -- for your stated reasons

There is little ill result of you using a different repo for Wine.
However, what happens if you used a different repo for each program
you wanted up to date. You'd have:

A Tor repo
a Tremulous repo
a Warsow repo
a Firefox repo
a Wine repo
etc

This would initially give you your ideal solution of having the most
up-to-date versions in the stable release of Ubuntu. All these repos
are built using the latest stable, so they should work together ...
right? Maybe. But the devil's in the details, and here's some things
to consider:

Ubuntu packages are updated for security issues. Do you know if all
your third party repos are?
Ubuntu packages are subject to peer review to confirm an update won't
break your system. Are your third party repos run by just one guy?
Ubuntu packages are in the repos before the next stable release, are
available on release day, and designed to transition correctly. What
happens if you update to the newest stable, and there aren't new
packages in your third party repo? If there are, has the maintainer
tries dist-upgrading using them?
Are your third party repositories updating packages that are
/dependencies/ of other packages you have?

If the answer to any of these is bad, then you're in for a world of
pain at some point. The sort of pain that Distributions are designed
to prevent. Having a third party up-to-date version of Wine might make
some things easier, but Ubuntu recognizing third party repos is a
slippery slope. Wine might be an exception, but policy wasn't made for
such exceptions.

An option would be to perhaps have two versions in the repo.

wine-stable -- the version synced during feature freeze, that Ubuntu
supports (sort of)
wine-latest -- the latest version, synced regularly from the Wine
repo. MOTU's don't support it, they just update it.

Then a virtual package wine, which is implemented by both.
Thoughts? I know that, if renaming the package, direct syncing would
not be possible, but hopefully there's something similar that can be
done without much MOTU effort, if they thought this was worth it.

Joe Terranova
PS: I use the Wine repo too. But after the latest update, running wine
turns my screen black, and I don't know what to do about it.