some philosophical questions- why not Wine64 + others

[roadapathy]

Why in the world is WINE still not supporting the 64 bit version?

Since Ubuntu 14.04, I haven't been able to even install WINE from the repositories. Why? Did Ubuntu cause a problem or did the WINE developers miss something?
( Some indepth information, I tried Ubuntu/Xubuntu and Kubuntu 15.04 from USB flash drive with no updates. WINE does not install on any of them! Each time it claims there is a missing dependency and complains that WINE is "broken.")

When I used Ubuntu 10.10 + WINE 1.59, most games worked! I could even compile WINE myself and it ran great. That is not true today. Has WINE regressed or am I doing something wrong?

Is the project moving forward?

Does Windows updates just set the WINE project back? Should WINE devs focus on Windows 7?

I just wanted to vent a little. Maybe somebody could help me understand this better.


EDIT!
I found this link...
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19854

I'm going to follow through on that advice right now.

[dimesio]

Why in the world is WINE still not supporting the 64 bit version?

I have no idea what you mean by this. 64 bit Wine has been available since 1.2, and AFAIK all the major distros have been packaging it since 1.4.

Has WINE regressed or am I doing something wrong?

Regressions affecting the specific apps you are trying to run are certainly possible; however, that wouldn't prevent you from installing your distro's Wine packages. Since the majority of our users are on Ubuntu, using the distro packages, I'd say it must be you doing something wrong. Ask for help on the Ubuntu forum.

[roadapathy]

Sorry, that didn't answer any philosophical questions but I can say that I was able to install Xubuntu 15.04 freshly, add the Wine-staging ppa since WineHQ repository version along is broken, and it is now working. However, I can not compile Wine-staging on a 64 bit system. The 64 bit compiles fine, but the 32 bit does not. It appears that it is quite useless without the 32 bit component, even on a fully 64 bit system. So strange, and poorly implemented in my humble non-developer opinion.

[roadapathy]

Why in the world is WINE still not supporting the 64 bit version?

I have no idea what you mean by this. 64 bit Wine has been available since 1.2, and AFAIK all the major distros have been packaging it since 1.4.

Yes, it has 64 bit support but without the 32 bit components, it does not appear to work even on a 64 bit system. Why? That doesn't make any sense. The winecfg points only to wine 32 bit and not the wine 64bit.

[roadapathy]

Sorry if I sound frustrated. I really do appreciate the good work of the developers and I'm not a developer so I don't know fully what I'm talking about. From the perspective of a user, who really needs to compile wine in order to properly play Windows games on Linux, the project is difficult to build on a very popular Linux distro. If I could get things working, I will write a guide for others to use. I have done that in the past.

[dimesio]

Pure 64 bit Wine should run pure 64 bit Windows apps, but since most Windows apps are still 32 bit, and require 32 bit libraries to run, you are correct that 64 bit Wine alone is largely useless. That's why a pure 64 bit Wine configuration is not supported. Properly packaged Wine will include the needed 32 bit parts along with 64 bit Wine, either in the same package or in a separate package that is pulled in as a dependency. CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux 7 have decided to be pure 64 bit distros; their Wine packages are 64 bit only. That was a distro decision, and there is nothing the Wine developers can do about it.

If you are building Wine yourself, you need to build both 32 and 64 bit Wine in a shared WoW64 setup. General instructions for doing that are here: http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64; Ubuntu-specific instructions are here: http://wiki.winehq.org/BuildingBiarchWineOnUbuntu.

[roadapathy]

I wasn't one of the lucky ones to have gotten those instructions to work on Xubuntu 15.04. I do have a 64bit on my SSD and 32bit version on my hdd that I can boot into. Couldn't I copy files over from the 32bit Xubuntu into the 64bit Xubuntu?