Continuing usage of libwine 1.0.1

[Reinhard Tartler]

CC'ing poster as I'm not sure if he is subscribed to this
list. Apologies if I'm wrong.

On Di, Jan 19, 2010 at 17:58:14 (CET), info at bandshed.net wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Before you read this rest assured I am well aware of the minefield that is
> VST support in Linux!
>
> As someone who builds and benefits from your work, I was wondering about
> the libwine dependency in any VST related packages like DSSI-VST and LMMS.
> My distro (AV Linux) uses the lamaresh repository Wine packages which of
> course I don't expect you to support but I can't use your packages for
> LMMS or even DSSI-VST without ripping out the existing Wine install. In my
> experience libwine 1.0.1 has reduced abilities with VST plugins in
> comparison to more recent builds of Wine and although I have noted the
> there is a new "libwine-unstable" none of your existing VST related
> packages will use it as a dependency.
>
> Would it be possible to at the very least link to the libwine-unstable
> packages or even better allow for regular Wine and Wine-dev packages to
> satisfy the dependencies as well?

I don't think this would be acceptable, because since libwine-unstable
is not intended to reach 'testing', packages linked against it could
never migrate to testing themselves, and thus be never part of the next
debian stable release.

> I wouldn't think that this is an uncommon scenario with many Debian users
> let alone AV Linux users to be wanting to use the lamaresh packages
> instead of relying on the very outdated libwine 1.0.1.

Have you tried building the VST packages against the wine version in
experimental?

libwine |    1.0.1-1 |        stable | amd64, i386
libwine |    1.0.1-2 |       testing | amd64, i386
libwine |    1.0.1-2 |      unstable | amd64, i386
libwine-unstable |   1.1.32-1 |      unstable | amd64, i386
libwine |   1.1.24-2 |  experimental | amd64, hurd-i386, i386, kfreebsd-i386, powerpc

I am not familiar with neither wine nor VST at all, but it seems to me
that both packages come from the same branch. If the version of wine in
'experimental' does satisfy your needs, we could:

 a) upload VST package to experimental and build against that version of
    wine there
 b) ask the wine maintainers to work on updating the outdated wine
    package in testing

a) and b) do not exclude each other

But as said, as I have no experience at all with VST package, I'd rather
leave this to our VST experts.

> Lastly does the pkg-multimedia team have a donations link? I would very
> much like to send some AV Linux donations (meager as they are) upstream to
> the team in appreciation for this unprecedented effort in Linux multimedia
> packaging,

No, and we'd probably wouldn't have neither the ressources nor
infrastructure to maintain donations, I think. What you could do,
however, is to talk to our DPL (leader at debian.org) about making a
earmarked donation to Debian for pkg-multimedia purposes.

> soon there will be no need for Multimedia-centred Debian Distros at
> all. (perhaps that is your goal!?)

Ultimatively, I think so, yes. However, we could always need more
manpower in form of package review and testing. Feel free to subscribe
to our mailing lists and share your opinion on our patches and packages.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4