The Wine developers are now working to provide more up to date packages specific for some of the major distributions out there, which should make it easier for users to get their hand on the bleeding edge stuff.

One of the issues with Wine is that repositories don't usually integrate the latest version of the application, and that's a real problem since most of the time the most recent version is needed to run modern Windows applications. Each big distribution has its own repositories and different maintainers for the Wine package. With the exception of a few operating systems, users don't get the latest version of Wine.

The Wine developers want to improve this situation and they are already building specific packages for some of the distros, although some of you might notice some big names missing, such as Ubuntu for example.

Wine for everyone

Compiling the latest version of Wine is not difficult, but it's not something the usual people are willing to do. This means that getting the bleeding edge is out of reach for most users.

"Since we already build packages for Wine Staging, we offered to extend our current system to include the development branch. As part of this process, we decided to drop our dependency on external build services (except Launchpad) and instead build everything in our own VMs. We also extended our build scripts to provide a more general way of building packages which is less tied to Wine Staging or Wine in general" reads the announcement made by the Wine devs.

Until now, the covered systems are Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mageia, CentOS, and Arch Linux. If you take a closer look, you'll probably notice that Ubuntu is missing from this bunch, but it's not clear why.

A new major Wine 1.8 release is really close, and it looks like it's going to happen in the next couple of weeks.