On Tue, 10 Feb 2015, Jerome Leclanche wrote: [...]
The problem of the "Stable" vs "Develop" distinction is kind of lost in a model like Wine's. Users care about things being stable because they don't want what they currently use to break. However, since Wine is always playing catch-up to Windows, you have a lot of bits which are *broken* and get taken care of in further dev releases. So the usual view that "stable is good, master is buggy" is completely wrong and it's not an easy thing to explain to users.
Users care that the application they are using does not stop working and that's what can happen with the development branch. So the distinction between stable and development branches does make sense.
And just like in other projects you can be forced to use a development version because of compatibility issues with your hardware or of a feature you absolutely need, in Wine you can be forced to use the development version because of compatibility issues with your Windows applications.
So really the stable / development distinction is no different in Wine than in other projects.
The only thing that sets Wine apart is that it evolves pretty fast and yet has very infrequent stable releases. Hence these problems.