New information, wine/wine-staging packaging will cease in January 2016, please check for latest updates at bottom of post.

Normally, the Liquorix repo just contains the Liquorix kernel, but a pet peeve of mine has been neglected far too long. There is no real solution to a modern version of Wine in Debian Unstable if one prefers to stay under the Debian umbrella of mainstream repositories.

From what I understand, most Debian users end up simply rebuilding wine from git and rolling the updates when they please. This seems to me like a terrible workaround for a package as useful and popular as Wine. Going forward, I'm supplying a Wine package based off of Scott Ritchie's work here: launchpad.net/~ubuntu-wine/+archive/ppa. I don't know yet how much time investment it will require, but I suspect that this shouldn't be an issue since the initial package took significantly less time than I first estimated.

One thing all amd64 users must know is that this package does depend on Debian's multi-arch implementation. You must run dpkg --add-architecture i386 to add support for the i386 package pool. Afterwards, go ahead and run apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade so all the new i386 packages get installed.

More information can be read in Debian's multi-arch wiki if needed here: wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/Implementation

If everything goes right, I hope this saves someones time. I know that I've wasted a lot of time trying to get wine working properly in Debian through pre-existing packages. I had no success until I rebuilt Scott's packages for Debian (thanks Scott!), so I thought it was perfectly appropriate to share my results with all you hansom and beautiful (for the ladies) Liquorix users.

Update for June 2015:

wine-staging is now available in Liquorix and is updated more frequently than the traditional wine package.

From www.wine-staging.com: Wine Staging (formerly wine-compholio) is a special wine version containing bug fixes and features, which are not yet available in regular wine versions. The idea of Wine Staging is to provide new features faster to end users and to give developers the possibility to discuss and improve their patches before they are sent upstream.

Note that the traditional wine package is updated at the same cadence as the wine PPA here: launchpad.net/~ubuntu-wine/+archive/ubuntu/ppa. If this package is out of date, take a look at wine-staging.

Update for December 2015:

It appears that winehq.org has finally replaced the old and deprecated Debian repository they were linking to with their own auto-building system here: wiki.winehq.org/Debian. And below are some quick start instructions based off of the wiki:



If you get an error about the https protocol, you need to install apt-transport-https:


wine1.7 has been removed from the liquorix repo and only wine-staging remains and is currently up to date with winehq's own debian repository. I will watch for about a month or two more, and if winehq proves to be a reliable way to get the latest version of wine consistently, wine-staging will be removed from liquorix.net.

< Edited by damentz :: Oct 14, 17, 13:43 >
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Thank you very much for those packages. This really saves time. Though there are some tricky things left.

Official Debian winetricks package is designed to be installed with Debian packaged Wine. It depends on "wine-bin | wine-bin-unstable | wine64-bin" and "libwine | libwine-unstable | libwine-dbg-unstable". So when you have Liquorix Wine installed and you are going to install winetricks, this will lead to nice breakage of the whole Wine, as some parts of officially packaged Wine will be installed also.

Maybe you can add some additional conflicts and replaces into you packages' descriptions, so they could satisfy winetricks deps? Or just repackage winetricks from the same PPA.

And another one. Is it possible to provide wine-gecko and wine-mono in your repository too? This would be really helpful.

Cheers,
z
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Hi z0rc,

Packaging wine is a really low priority thing for me. I think instead of packaging winetricks and the other packages, I'll just mark them as conflicts. To be honest, it never made sense to me that winetricks was a package. Same thing as putting smxi or inxi in a package, they are frequently updated scripts that are easy to maintain.

h2 might also vouch for this idea, we recently found that Linux Mint was packaging a seriously old version of inxi and when we were presented output on the #smxi channel, we found that it was missing the information we were looking for. I'm not going to package something that I'll let get that far out of date - I see Debian maintainers do that all the time with games and it always causes the user to forego the packaged version for the multiplayer compatible version on the upstream website.
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Hi,

Well the main point is user experience. In Ubuntu it takes one command to get everything installed (with wine's PPA enabled), I don't get why it's hard to replicate this in Debian. In PPA winetricks updated from SVN every time the new version of wine comes out. Frequent enough and everyone are satisfied. Repackaging of winetricks and binary installers (gecko and mono) wouldn't take more then 10 minutes including building actual packages.

The question is not about should or shouldn't winetricks be packaged in Debian. It's already there. Question is how to deal with it when user wants to install the package (which will be his first attempt before going to official site). Setting up conflict relationship doesn't do the trick. It just makes things messy without explanation what just happened.
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Are you volunteering to set this up and contribute your time, and not just this once, but for the coming years? Since it's so little time or effort, I guess it won't be that hard for you to do, right?

Or is this another case of how easy it is to volunteer someone else to do a job?

Now there may be some adjustments possible, personally I don't care because I gave up on wine years ago, but possibly there is.

Now, if wine tricks is a simple script and all users need to do is download it, that's a totally different situation, at that point it's kind of hard to know why a user can't do that simple step.
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Packaging winetricks means updating the package everytime there's a new winetricks update. As far as I know, winetricks has rapid updates - I literally always update winetricks before running.

In fact, the only reasonable thing to do when creating a winetricks package would be to write a wrapper for winetricks that performs all the updates for you before launching the upstream tool. I believe this is the same method used in Cathbard's smxi package - he doesn't actually package smxi itself, but provides an easier way to grab the script, which then auto-updates itself.

So to answer your question, it's not so easy to package winetricks. It wouldn't be responsible of me to package winetricks straight since I couldn't possibly, unless I really cared, to update the package whenever there was an update.
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I have installed wine 1.5.12-1 onto siduction a while ago.
Iit used to work for a while but now, after some D-Us it doesn't anymore.
I have seen that there is an newerubuntur version in the repo but none for sid yet.
Wil there be another one for sid at some point of timeorcan the ubuntu-version be used onto sid too ?

regards

Reiner
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Updated the package.

And yes, you can run the version in the Ubuntu repo, but it's easier to rebuild the package for Debian than find an ubuntu repository that has compatible dependencies.
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Great work! I've been looking for a good repository and compiled wine myself. But, just before install I noticed that the kernel repository I used, contained also newer wine binaries. So I saved myself the hassle. :)

Is this being actively updated if there are any "major" updates to wine?
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It sort of is. I've been watching the changelogs for the last few versions of wine. There's nothing really interesting happening and no new version has yet to fix any show stopper bugs on any games that I've tried to get working in the past, like StarCraft 2.

So yes, I am updating it, but very selectively as bugs that matter to me get corrected, otherwise the version in the repo now should be good enough. If there is an application you're using that works correctly in a newer version of wine, let me know and I'll build a new update. It takes a bit of time since I pull scott's package and correct the dependencies to work correctly in Debian Sid.
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