https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40363
--- Comment #3 from Sebastian Lackner sebastian@fds-team.de --- (In reply to Carter Young from comment #2)
The USE Case here is that I don't have what WineHQ considers to be a stable version in my tree because of a USE Flag argument?? I can't report bugs against 1.6.2 here anymore, because my bug would be closed after being told to upgrade, and I'm surely not submitting a bug here against the bleeding edge testing version, when I have 3 minor version changes in between.
When filing a bug, you will always be asked to test with one of the latest development versions - no matter if you use 1.6.2 or 1.8.1. The current development version (1.9.6) is about three months ahead of stable and already contains plenty of improvements in various areas. Nevertheless, the lack of packages for 1.8.1 on Gentoo is something we cannot fix here at WineHQ. NP-Hardass will take care of that, just be patient a bit.
Why tell our maintainer that he has access to the staging patchset, and then not supply one? The issue here is that once a USE Flag is created in a certain package it's expected to be backwards compatible. You can't enable the option in 1.8, and then disable the option in 1.8.1. For that matter you can't enable it in 1.8 and expect it to work in 1.6.2, hence the wording above. If the stable versions aren't meant to include the staging patchset, then you and our package maintainer need to decide how to remove the staging USE Flag from all versions. This is complicated by the fact that we can use Stable and Unstable versions. The intent here was that the unstable versions contain the staging USE Flag. Using your logic, we would need to mask the staging Flag for each version marked stable, using package.use.stable.mask?
We never announced that we would provide Staging patchsets for stable versions because, as pointed out above, it is a contradiction. If people want experimental features, then they can use Wine Staging - if they prefer stability over new features, then they can use the stable version of Wine without Staging.
Please note that 1.8.0 is basically both "stable" and "development" at the same time. Afterwards, the development branch continued with 1.9.0 (for which we provide Staging patchsets) and the stable branch with 1.8.1 (which only gets minor bugfixes to increase stability).
I am not sure what the best way is to fix the Gentoo packages, but since we always had a good contact to NP-Hardass in the past, I am pretty sure a solution suitable for everyone can be found quickly.
The intent of a mask in Gentoo implies that a package isn't completely stable, i.e our maintainer is having to be a hardass to quell the small riot we'd have among our userbase that understands cascaded masking.
I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS has been going on over a year or more. I'm ashamed to say that I missed out on a 1.7.x stable branch because of this same argument
1.7.x/1.9.x are development branches of Wine, not stable branches. Besides that, I have no idea what you are complaining about. I am not aware of any other version not available on Gentoo because of the lack of a Staging patchset.