14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine project is evolving, and developers have announced that Wine Staging and the regular Wine project have been merged, which should help users get their hands on the latest improvements and changes faster.
Even if Wine has a stable and development release, the fixes that the developers were adding each week were not reaching the community fast enough. This is the reason Wine Staging existed, but it looks like this "branch" of the Wine was regarded as more of a fork. It had its own bug tracker, and it's been getting a lot of users as of late. Doubling the effort for the original developers is not really something that people want to do, so a change was needed to be made.
The Wine project has been getting a lot of users in the past couple of years, and it's easy to understand why. A lot of people have migrated to Linux from Windows, and they still want to use some of the applications from that platform. Wine is more or less the only solution to do that (with all of its variants), and it's been getting a lot better at it. Some of the users might remember that Wine's success in running Windows apps was pretty much hit and miss, but now you hardly find games or apps that don't run, unless they are extremely new.
Wine Staging is not going anywhere
When the developers are saying that Wine Staging and Wine are merging, they don't mean that Staging is going away. They are just merging the efforts, and the Staging branch will continue to be available.
"Wine Staging has already existed about a year and, although used by many people until recently there was no final decision about its relation to WineHQ. Many people saw Wine Staging as a fork and, as a result, users were asked not to use the upstream bug tracker or AppDB, which pressured us to setup our own infrastructure. Based on the decisions made during the Wine developer conference (WineConf 2015) last weekend, this situation is going to change. Wine Staging is now an official part of WineHQ, like the development and stable versions of Wine," write the developers on their website.
Another interesting aspect of this merger is that WineHQ will start to provide binary packages for the development version of Wine, for the major distros, which means that users won't depend all that much on repositories.