http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31374
--- Comment #65 from Rosanne DiMesio dimesio@earthlink.net 2013-07-11 10:03:20 CDT --- (In reply to comment #64)
The what? We're not talking about "testing branches" here, we're talking about the 1.6.0 release, which is a stable release.
Well, I think that gets into the question of what purpose, if any, the "stable" branch serves. From what I've observed, it seems to serve two purposes: a security blanket for users who need one, and a reason to impose a code freeze once in awhile. Nobody cares about the first reason except the silly people who fall into that category. As for the second reason, since the issue here is completing an incomplete new feature, I suspect that code freeze means it can't be worked on until after 1.6 is released.
And what's the point of making users "test" something that's known to be broken for a year?
Incomplete is not the same as broken. New features are added to Wine in small parts, so each part can be tested and problems identified early, before something else is added that depends on behavior that turns out to be a real bug. In practice, this means that for a period of time when a new feature is being introduced, fixing one problem just leads you to next. That's what happened in this case--the first bug was a crash.
(In reply to comment #59)
Before the response was "this is an unstable Wine version, we will fix it later, downgrade to stable"
I don't know where you imagine you saw the advice to downgrade to the stable release, but it's nowhere in this bug report.