Wine Release Plan

Wine 1.2 will come out some time in the future. Alexandre has said he will start the stabilization process after at least one of the following major features is done:

• DIBEngine bug #421

• MacOSX QuartzDriver

• USB Support bug #9649

• Direct3D 10

• 64-bit support

• Multiuser Wineserver bug#11112

Of these, the most promising to be implemented first is USB Support for newer iPods. Ideally, this would be done by February or so, in order to stabilize Wine in time for a March/April release, which would in turn allow Wine 1.2 to ship with the next wave of distros based on the new Gnome and X. We missed March/April, Wine 1.2 will not be seen until a major feature is completed.

If we take too long, we run another risk: distros might start having to do some of their own release-management work themselves in order to get a fairly current Wine. This duplicates work, and if not done properly users will end up with different, unstable versions of Wine.

Branching

Wine now uses a stable/unstable branch model. Even-numbered releases (eg 1.0.x) will be stable, with only minimal changes merged in. Development will continue on the 1.1.x branch until we stabilize it for the 1.2.0 release, after which 1.3 will become the new development branch. When asked whether the 1.1.x branch can be considered "alpha" or "beta", Alexandre responded that it is the "development branch" -- for end user purposes, this means alpha (and thus prone to regressions) until we freeze for 1.2.

Press Mentions

OK, this one made me smile:

• "Linux Users Ready to Toast Wine", PC World, Feb 2002, on the imminent release of Wine 1.0, which promptly came out 6 years later.