Hi everyone,
I just wanted to update you all on the state of the Wine packages for Debian; back in July, the difference between the "wine-development" and "wine" packages came up, not to mention which version WineHQ's download page should actually point to. Although it's fresher than the stable release of Wine, the default version of the wine-development package in Jessie is outdated by almost a year now.
Over the past couple of months though, Jens Reyer worked with the Debian wine packaging team on backporting an up-to-date version of wine-development for Jessie. That Jessie-Backports package became available right around the beginning of September so now there's a curated way for users on Debian Stable to track the upstream development releases. IIUC, the Backports version tracks the package in Testing so it will still fall behind some while Testing is in a code-freeze, but it's a good compromise with Debian's goals, plus the policy for Backports is that they should only track Unstable for critical reasons.
When closing out my bug report, Jens mentioned that upgrading the wine-development packages directly from the Jessie version to Jessie-Backports still may take some manual tweaking, though he's working on resolving that. He also recommended that instead of having the WineHQ download page link to... https://packages.debian.org/stable/wine-development we aim the link at the list of all living versions of the wine-development package: https://packages.debian.org/wine-development He also suggested that if it doesn't cause problems, we keep a link to the stable release package, just in case someone prefers it (or they're still stuck on oldstable): https://packages.debian.org/wine I can probably squeeze in some time in the next few days to submit those changes myself.
- Kyle