However, I refuse to force the Wine package to depend on it because this wine-gecko-1.0 package doubles the required download (7.8MB wine-gecko-1.0, 7.8MB wine 1.1.33 package). I realise that this will not be required to download on every upgrade, but I also can't predict when wine-gecko releases are made.
What's the download size got to do with anything? Do you want to force people to use an old, unsupported version of Wine because its download size is smaller? Please, don't conflate unrelated issues.
say it is". If this was something like, e.g., my decision to not separate OpenGL from the core Wine package, it wouldn't be a real problem (OpenGL support is used by the majority of Wine users, and takes up very little space in the binary distrobution), but it's not.
Says who? Don't make unsupported claims, please. I've never used OpenGL support in Wine, but I have used gecko.
Jacek's justification has been the number of bugs that are closed invalid due to an invalid configuration. Strongly encouraging people to install gecko would reduce the time we all spend looking at bogus bug reports. Personally, I think that's worth considering, especially because developer man hours are perhaps the most scarce resource for the Wine project. --Juan