Slotted WINE: Gentoo users have a reason to celebrate now

[ThunderRd]

Some important news for Gentoo users, multiple WINE installations now possible. This new ability means users can build WINE to their own preferences, and keep multiple packages accessible for special use cases:

2017-04-10-split-and-slotted-wine
Title app-emulation/wine split and slotting
Author NP-Hardass <NP-Hardass@gentoo.org>
Posted 2017-04-10
Revision 1

Starting with Wine 2.0, Wine in Gentoo is transitioning away from its
traditional packaging and toward a new, split and slotted, Wine.

As many Wine users know, there are often regressions or an application
works better on one version of wine than another. Going forward,
packaging in Gentoo will allow simultaneous installation of multiple
versions of Wine.

Additionally, to expedite vanilla releases as well as permit multiple
configurations for each Wine installation, the major patchsets have
been split out into separate packages.

Going forward, app-emulation/wine will transition to:
app-emulation/wine-vanilla: upstream Wine with no external patchsets
(like if the old packaging forced USE="-staging -d3d9")
app-emulation/wine-staging: Wine with Wine-Staging's patchset
(like if the old packaging forced USE="+staging -d3d9")
app-emulation/wine-d3d9: Wine with Ixit's Gallium Nine patchset
(like if the old packaging forced USE="-staging +d3d9")
app-emulation/wine-any: Wine with any of the patchsets or flags
(exactly like the old packaging regarding USE flags)

wine-any exists to allow the user to build any combination that they'd
like (like the old packaging). This means the user could use wine-any
to use both Wine-Staging and Gallium Nine. Alternatively, the user
could use wine-any to try out another configuration from other
packages. For example, the user could build wine-vanilla without
PulseAudio, and could build wine-any with PulseAudio. The sky is the
limit on how a user may choose to use app-emulation/wine-any.

Users may opt for any specific package, or may emerge virtual/wine,
which is provided for dependency resolution.
Maintainers: Please note, app-emulation/wine will be dropped, so
please use virtual/wine going forward.

Users may call each version specifically, or may call a symlink based
on their installed patchset, for example wine-2.1, wine-staging-2.2,
or wine-d3d9.

Symlinks for wine are managed with app-eselect/eselect-wine.
# eselect wine set wine-vanilla-2.0
/usr/bin/wine -> /usr/bin/wine-vanilla-2.0
# eselect wine set --staging wine-staging-2.4
/usr/bin/wine-staging -> /usr/bin/wine-staging-2.4

 

[booman]

I think they just made Wine even more complicated. It was already too hard to use and now I don't know how to use it at all....
I'm sticking with PlayOnLinux because they compile Wine versions for us. They even compiles staging and patched versions for us.

 

[ThunderRd]

The news item does not apply to anyone other than Gentoo users, because it's specific to the Gentoo packaging of WINE. Formerly, we could have only one WINE version installed, but this allow us to build several versions, as well as multiple builds of the same version with different USE flags, and have them exist on the same machine.

Then, via a command-line tool we can select which of the installed versions we wish to use with which Windows application.

Remember, there are lots of apps other than games that run well with WINE.

It's a big deal for regular users of WINE in Gentoo.

 

[Gizmo]

Yeah, the introduction of slotted builds in Portage was one of the best things they did (for the packages that support it). Being able to use that with WINE should help people solve a lot of issues.