excessive wine masking (imo)

arbuckle · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 6:02 pm Post subject: excessive wine masking (imo)

Just want to start by saying, this isn't a flame, I hope this post creates an interesting and informative discussion. I'll try to keep this as opinion neutral as possible.
I was looking at gentoo-portage.com on the wine page and the newest unmasked version is 9.49. What is the criteria for deciding what wine versions get masked and what versions don't? I asked about this on IRC and I got a few arguments to justify why so many versions of wine are masked.

-- Wine is masked because application x works, and in the others it doesn't.
The wine weekly news letter informs users of all appdb changes, and it's true, some apps get broken but overall most get improved on each release. What makes application x so important? Why hold (on average) others back for one application?

-- Those versions of wine are still under testing to make sure they are stable.
Wine is going to be unstable for a very, very long time. In fact wine is implied unstable software. Are they masked because there is a gentoo specific problem with those versions? wine 9.50 is 16 weeks old, is it still under testing? Wine is released every two weeks. If we want to unmask a version of wine in time to make it worthwhile to get that release open before the next release then it needs to get unmasked in less than two weeks, because after that point we may as well just next the next newer version.

-- If you want version x of wine, just unmask it.
Then what's masking for in the first place? It helps people make good decisions about what versions of packages they need, and this idea loops back to the beginning that wine version 9.49 is way too old and 99% of the population would benefit from the latest version.

What is the criteria to decide what versions of wine get unmasked and what's wrong with all the versions that are masked?

RazielFMX · l33t Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 835 Location: NY, USA

I have to say I have often wondered this myself... Personally, I have wine unmasked by ~x86, and it is one of the few packages I still have unmasked (had a lot of issues with my laptop that were fixed by newer software, when the software was eventually stable, I went back and cleaned up my package.keywords).
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PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

arbuckle · Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 8:21 pm Post subject:

that reminds me, wine version 1.0 is going to be a big release, but it's not going to be some magical number and suddenly many apps will start to work perfectly. Here are the goals for wine 1.0

I don't think that they will all get completed in time however. Wine releases are time-dependent, not improvement dependent. (Not that wine isn't constantly getting better)

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

wine is very complex and notorious for regression bugs thats the main reason
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