Hi everyone,
I would like to announce some very important build server / packaging related changes that will take effect with the next release. As most of you should know, Sebastian and I took care of the Wine Development and Staging builds for more than a year now. So far we were using a collection of scripts which were run on a dedicated machine to build and upload the packages. This solution did not scale very well, so we decided to rework the whole build system.
The new system can not only be controlled using a command line utility but also provides an easy to use website which gives us the possibility to provide some great new features. Interested Wine developers will be able to request access to the system so that they can start their own builds. This can for example be used to provide a patched Wine version for testing in a bug report or to verify that a patch is compatible with all platforms and compilers.
Nevertheless, in this mail I would like to concentrate on the user related changes. The developer related features need some further polishing and will be announced in a separate mail. Starting with the next release, we will use our new build server to compile the packages, leading to the following differences:
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Launchpad is no longer used for the Ubuntu builds -------------------------------------------------
In order to provide the possibility for Wine developers to create their own builds through our system, we had to move away from Launchpad. This will also have the advantage that we can provide older builds (see below). The disadvantage of this change is that our users will have to manually switch from the PPA to the new repository, since there is no way to push prebuilt Debian/Ubuntu packages into a PPA on Launchpad (not even with a commercial subscription).
We already added the new Ubuntu repository to the CDN, so that users can start switching by now and don't have to wait till the next release. The repository can be added using the following commands:
wget https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key sudo apt-key add Release.key sudo apt-add-repository 'https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/'
To make sure that all users will be informed about this change, I will push at least one additional update (Wine 2.5) to the PPA that displays a warning during the package upgrade containing the necessary instructions (I hope this also works on Ubuntu, I have only tested it on Debian so far). This means users will have at least two weeks to switch from the PPA to the new repository - maybe a bit more if we push additional builds.
Old packages for Ubuntu / Debian --------------------------------
On the last build server we used reprepo to generate the Debian repositories. One disadvantage of the tool is that it does not support multiple versions of a package. We tried several other tools, but they did not fit our needs, so I ended up writing my own tool that does not have this limitation. This will make it easy to download and test old versions of Wine when using the new repository. There are some small packaging changes left, but in the future you will be able to tell apt-get which version you would like to install using:
sudo apt-get install winehq-devel=2.4.0-1~stretch
You can get a list of all available versions with:
apt-cache policy winehq-devel
Notes: * The "-1~stretch" part is used for the packaging. * The additional ".0" version component is added for technical reasons, to ensure package managers can determine which version is the latest one.
Wine Stable is now available as package ---------------------------------------
We will start providing builds for Wine Stable, which will be called "winehq-stable". This is actually a change we have planned for quite some time now, but all the manual steps involved in the old build system and the limited resources blocked us from doing this change earlier.
Added / removed distros -----------------------
The following distros have been removed as they are no longer supported or reach their EOL within the next month: * Ubuntu Precise * Fedora 23 * Mageia 4
One new distro has been added: * Fedora 25
We had to temporarily disable the building of packages for Mageia 5. The problem is that the tool used for generating the repository files is not very compatible with other distros and I did not find a working combination of genhdlist2, URPM and librpm that works on Debian without any warnings or errors. We therefore decided to pause the builds until we made sure that we can provide a fully working repository.
repos.wine-staging.com changes ------------------------------
This only affects users who are still getting their packages from repos.wine-staging.com. So far we were providing two repositories, the original one at repos.wine-staging.com and the new one at dl.winehq.org. We wanted to get rid of the original one for quite some time now, since both repositories basically contain the same packages. We decided that it is now the perfect time to make this step. In order to receive further updates, those users will have to switch to the dl.winehq.org repository by following the normal installation instructions. We will also post an announcement on the wine-staging.com website to make all users aware of this change.
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As you can see there are plenty of changes, and there are even more developer related changes ahead. Although we would like to avoid any inconvenience, there is some manual work involved for some of our users. Ubuntu users will have to switch to the WineHQ repository, and repos.wine-staging.com users will have to update repository paths for all distributions. Nevertheless, we believe that these changes are very useful and will make things much easier in the long term.
Regards, Michael