Transition from wine1.6 to wine packages from Debian

[Graham Inggs]

Hi Ubuntu developers

Wine has been maintained separately from Debian in Ubuntu since
forever, and almost single-handedly by Scott Richie (thanks!).

Sadly, the Wine packages in Ubuntu have recently fallen behind, and
nobody stepped up to fill Scott's shoes.  Earlier this year, I filed a
bug [1] which ended up being used to discuss the situation and various
possible solutions.

During DebConf16, I met Jens Reyer of Debian's Wine Team and we came
up with a plan to transition to the Wine packages from Debian,
providing a smooth upgrade path and avoiding the epoch bump.  After
18.04 we would be able to drop the delta between the Debian and Ubuntu
packages.

We plan to upload to Yakkety the wine source package from Debian with
additional breaks and replaces and a few other minor packaging
changes.  We would also upload a replacement for the wine1.6 source
package consisting of transitional packages that conflict with the old
Ubuntu packages and depend on the new packages from Debian.

The packages are currently available for testing from Jens' PPA [2].

Unfortunately, we will lose some of the desktop integration features
that Scott worked on, as these do not fit in with the Debian Wine
Team's current plans and some are seen as security risks.  However, we
will benefit from the up-to-date packages and the reduced maintenance
overhead by adopting the Debian packages.

Please send comments to the aforementioned bug [1].

Regards
Graham


[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine1.6/+bug/1558480
[2] https://launchpad.net/~jre-phoenix/+archive/ubuntu/transition+wine1.6+wine/