Wine(tricks) needs a new maintainer

[Austin English]

Howdy all,

I'm the upstream maintainer of Winetricks [1], a script used by Wine
users to work around wine bugs, as well as a Wine developer.

The reason I'm writing is that the version in Ubuntu is over two years
old, and for a project that involves downloading files from live
internet links, that version is almost completely broken after Microsoft
removed a lot of old downloads for <=XP. Of course, there has also been
a lot of new features added and bugs fixed in that time.

Ubuntu currently ships 20141009, latest is 20160329 (though I'm planning
to make a new release in the next couple days). This leads to a lot of
confused users [2], who apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, then
file bugs with wine/winetricks that have been fixed for months or years
in some cases.

Anyway, Scott Ritchie is listed as the current maintainer, who's been
inactive with Wine for a long time, leading Wine upstream to start
provide their own packages because Ubuntu wasn't providing current
releases [3]. Wine hasn't been updated since trusty (14.04), still stuck
at 1.6.2, while upstream is on 1.9.8, with 3 new stable releases if
Ubuntu didn't want to use the development versions.

So, I'd like to know what the process is for having a maintainer removed
from a package, so that someone else can maintain it. If not, I'd prefer
to see Winetricks removed from Ubuntu, as currently it's more broken
than useful. I'd say Wine should probably also be removed if it's not
going to be maintained, but that's my personal opinion as it's not been
discussed upstream.

Cheers,
Austin

[1] https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/
[2] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40514#c5
[3] https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu

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