https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57092
--- Comment #6 from mata sutupud@yahoo.com --- (In reply to jepetersen from comment #2)
Bullseye was released in the Spring of 2022. What ever happened to LTS support?
August 2021 actually. At that time the most recend wine stable was at 6.0.
Almost all Wine users are Debian users. Nobody wants to have to install all those dependencies from source -- there are at least 50 of them, both amd64 and i386. Basically, you're telling me that Bullseye is useless for gaming, unless it's native linux. I find it hard to believe that Wine, a project that has been around for well over a decade just jumped from version 5.x to 9.x. Version number conventions don't tend to jump up so quickly, in my experience.
It's one major release per year (stable branch, X.0). Then deveolpment continues in the X.X branches, and after a feature freeze and several release candidates a new stable version is released.
Of course that model doesn't match Debian's release model, which sticks to one major version and keeps that over its release. There's very little chance to get any bugfixes into the 5.0 branch now, much less to have it show up in debian.
Perhaps I should rephrase my question, as I am sure I am not the only Debian user on the planet with similar issues. Would it be possible to get a 9.0 release in the Debian Bullseye repository, since Bullseye is a LTS release? Or, at least a workable version. I see in the Bullseye "backports" a 7.0 release. Maybe I'll try that one. I'm more married to Bullseye at the moment than you might think. Most people who work on extra large projects solo stick to the same LTS version long after LTS expires, in my experience.
That's fine if you want stability, but if you want non-security critical bugs fixed you'll ofen feel left beind on such a model. That said, there is a winehq debian repo with newer packages, which I bet "most debian users" who want a more recent version of wine than the debian repos provide use:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/debian/dists/bullseye/