What is Wine Staging?
---------------------

**Wine Staging** is the testing area of winehq.org. It contains bug fixes and
features, which have not been integrated into the development branch yet. The
idea of Wine Staging is to provide experimental features faster to end users and
to give developers the possibility to discuss and improve their patches before
they are integrated into the main branch. More information about Wine Staging
can also be found [on the WineHQ wiki](https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine-Staging).

Installation
------------

Ready-to-use packages for Wine Staging are available for a variety of Linux
distributions and for Mac OS X. Just follow the [installation
instructions](https://wiki.winehq.org/Download) for your operating system.

On most distributions the `wine-staging` package is installed to
`/opt/wine-staging`, such that multiple Wine versions can be installed in
parallel. If this is the case for your distribution, you will have to type
`/opt/wine-staging/bin/wine` instead of just `wine`. The same also applies for
other wine-specific programs like `winecfg`. To learn more about how to use
Wine Staging, please take a look at the
[usage instructions](https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine-Staging_Usage).

Building
--------

Wine Staging is maintained as a set of patches which has to be applied on top of
the development branch. In order to build Wine Staging, the first step is to
setup a build environment for Wine, including all required dependencies. A lot
of information about that is collected in the
[WineHQ Wiki](http://wiki.winehq.org/BuildingWine).

In order to apply all Wine Staging patches it is recommended to use the
`patchinstall.py` utility which takes care of applying all patches in the
correct order. For reference, the possible commandline arguments are:

```
Usage: ./staging/patchinstall.py [DESTDIR=path] [-W patchset] [patchset ...]

Autogenerated script to apply all Wine Staging patches on your Wine
source tree.

Configuration:
  DESTDIR=path         Specify the path to the wine source tree
  --all                Select all patches
  --force-autoconf     Run autoreconf and tools/make_requests after each patch
  --help               Display this help and exit
  --no-autoconf        Do not run autoreconf and tools/make_requests
  --no-patchlist       Do not apply patchlist (needed for 'wine --patches')
  --upstream-commit    Print the upstream Wine commit SHA1 and exit
  --version            Show version information and exit
  -W patchset          Exclude a specific patchset

Backends:
  --backend=patch      Use regular 'patch' utility to apply patches (default)
  --backend=git-am     Use 'git am' to apply patches
  --backend=git-apply  Use 'git apply' to apply patches
```

If you want to apply *all* patches with the `patch` utility, the commandline
should look similar to this:
```
./staging/patchinstall.py DESTDIR="/path/to/wine" --all
```

Before you proceed with the compilation, please make sure that you installed all
additional build dependencies required for the Wine Staging features you are
interested in (check output of `./configure`). More information about building
Wine Staging, optional build dependencies, and hints for packagers are collected
in our [Wiki](https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine-Staging).

Contributing
------------

For information on contributing to Wine-Staging, please see
<https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine-Staging_Contributing>. Note that GitHub pull
requests are strongly dispreferred, especially for patches.

Donations
---------

wine-staging is a large set of experimental patches which provide various
improvements to WINE, but are not quite suitable for upstreaming. This set of
patches has been continuously managed for many years by a small group of
volunteers. The way this works is that we often review patches attached to
various bug reports found at https://bugs.winehq.org/ which may fix bugs, but
may not be quite suitable to be upstreamed due to needing some cleanup or more
proper implementation. In the event that this happens, we add the patches to
wine-staging instead, and keep them updated and maintained as well as attempt to
clean them up to be upstreamed. We also both write and verify patches which fix
various bugs that may not have patches, and in turn allow them run better using
WINE. This includes testing on various hardware, games and applications.

Any expenses for applications, games, or hardware which we do not own comes out
of pocket. In order to alleviate these expenses, we are now accepting donations.
This in turn allows us to continue to perform testing, provide fixes, and get
them upstreamed, ultimately aiming to provide a better experience for all WINE
users. All of our work is provided publicly for free and can be found at
<https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine-staging>. We do not expect to be paid for
any of the work provided, nor will donators receive any special benefits or
compensation.

Donations are recieved through Patreon. Anyone interested may donate here:

https://www.patreon.com/winestaging
