The Debian packages have gotten rather out of date, and it looks like Ove's not going to be making them any more. I took the initiative and decided to try making one myself. I'm polishing off a new Debian package now.
Some major things I noticed:
1) There were a lot of old hacks in the package that are probably no longer necessary, due to advancements in wine like wineprefixcreate and such. There was also the remenants of a very old problem with compiling using flex (which I remember experiencing the old days) in the form of a special exception for installing newer flex packages.
2) Very old packages like winesetuptk should now be officially obsoleted by making them conflicted and replaced. I also did the same to the libwine-* packages that weren't doing anything but making documentation folders, like libwine-alsa.
3) Making my package looks to be a lot simpler than what's implied in the (now year out of date) package makers guide. I found that documentation quite useless (and didn't even find it until I was about half way done anyway). Again, this is probably due to advancements in wine itself.
4) What I didn't find is a standard list of packages that aren't strictly required for wine (like libxt-dev and flex), but that wine can benefit from. A good example would be the alsa development files. These are all things that should be included in the build dependencies for the package.
So far, my list of build dependant packages is the following: flex, bison, libx11-dev, libasound2-dev, libxt-dev, libicu28-dev
However, I'm not sure if this means the wine binary package should depend on them, since it's compiled in. So, should I make libicu28 a dependancy for wine?
Now, this leads to the question: is it worth even having a package maintainers guide? If so, who wants to update it?
Thanks, Scott Ritchie