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posted by
LaminatorX
on Saturday October 25 2014, @02:41PM
from the whining-is-not-efficacious dept.
from the whining-is-not-efficacious dept.
A grave bug has been introduced into the "wine" package of Debian Jessie, just days before the November 5th freeze deadline. The /usr/bin/wine launch script fails with an "error: unable to find wine executable. this shouldn't happen." message.
Debian has already suffered much unrest lately over the inclusion of systemd, with threats of a fork being issued, along with the possible cancellation of the GNU/kFreeBSD port and the possible dropping of support for the SPARC architecture. After so much strife and disruption, can Debian afford to have such a serious bug affect such a critical package so soon before such a major freeze?
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Wine Fails to Launch under Debian Jessie, Just Days before the Freeze Deadline
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(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday October 26 2014, @04:37AM
This isn't an obscure bug, though. This is Wine not starting up at all! It's obvious with even the most minimal level of testing. This is as bad as the JVM not starting up, or the Python interpreter not starting. This bug makes it so that thousands of other programs now can't be run. It's a very serious bug.
Why does it matter that it's obscure or not? It's a bug, it's testing, it will get fixed in time. This isn't the first time something major has broken in testing, and it won't be the last. I switched from stable to testing in 2005 and have been using it since, and while uncommon, this sort of thing does occasionally happen. Sometimes it's dependency screw-ups that make a package remove stuff it shouldn't, other times it's packaging errors that just break a program, but they get ironed out, especially for the bigger packages. One example that stands out in my memory is Compiz, because it used to break quite often between updates.
I'm not saying the bug isn't a bad one, but it's not a world-ending problem. Hell, the previous version (1.6.2-8) is still in the repository so it's not like you're stuck with the bad one. The first response to "oh crap wine broke" should have been "I better downgrade to the last working version" rather than "I will complain on SN about this".
These sorts of things are part of using the testing repo, though I'll admit it's easy to forget that considering how solid the testing repo usually is. I started using it as a rolling-release Debian on my main system because the major problems are so rare, but occasionally something like this happens and I just work around it for a few days.
Also, not directly relevant, but wine breakage vs python breakage isn't even remotely comparable, considering Python and Perl are actually needed for parts of the system but wine isn't. The JVM comparison is closer, though.