14 DAY TRIAL // On December 22, the Wine Staging development team was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Wine Staging 1.8 software, based on the recently released Wine 1.8 stable branch.
Being based on the stable source code of Wine 1.8, the Wine Staging 1.8 software should be considered a stable release as well. That is because the project's developers tracked every upstream movement very closely and managed to synchronize the build with the Wine 1.8 release so that it wouldn't be based on any development/unstable code. The Wine Staging branch was not affected by the development code freeze of Wine 1.8 either.
"Yesterday we released Wine Staging 1.8, which is kind of special as it is based on a stable release instead of a development release. Although Wine Staging was not really affected by the development code freeze, we still kept the changes small during this time, so you could consider this to be a stable staging release. Anyway, Christmas is very close, so we still prepared a small present in form of a new feature for this Wine Staging release," said the Wine Staging Team in the release announcement.
Meet WUSA
One of the most interesting things implemented in today's Wine Staging 1.8 software is support for Windows updates. The new feature is called WUSA and stands for Windows Update Stand-Alone Installer, and if you're already wondering how it works, we can tell you that it can be used to install official Windows Updates packages on Microsoft Windows Vista and higher implementations.
Therefore, you can now install Windows updates on your Wine Staging installation via some executable packages or Microsoft Updates (.msu) files that you can download from Microsoft. This new feature also lets users install things like .NET Framework 4.5, which is an essential component for Microsoft Windows operating systems, without using winetricks or other third-party helpers.
Download Wine Staging 1.8 right now from Softpedia.