14 DAY TRIAL // The Wine developers are putting some order into their project, and they have decided to switch the project to a time-based release model, with major releases coming only once a year.
Wine is a rather predictable piece of software, and we know that a new version is launched every Friday, at intervals that can vary between a few weeks and even a single week. Until now, the developers have been maintaining two branches, a development one and a stable one. For the past year or so, only the development branch has been updated, and the stable one has remained behind. Now that's about to change.
During the recent WineConf meeting, the devs have convened to get a major release of the software only once a year. In addition to this, the stable release will be supported in Bugzilla, and the changes are to take effect immediately, meaning that Wine will soon enter a code freeze.
"Michael Stefaniuc will be the stable maintainer starting with 1.8.x. Other people are more than welcome to help out with Wine Stable. I'll document stuff and send out a request for help during the code freeze," reads the announcement.
This new decision of the Wine project is not set in stone, and developers have promised to revisit it if the distance between two stable versions proves to be too long. In the meantime, you can download the latest Wine packages from Softpedia.