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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

To be completely fair, it really isn't that bad, at least not compared to other software. In my experience the only notably annoying part is getting all of the dependencies that you want. After that, it's basically an affair of ./configure && make.

If you are using Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora, you can probably use WineHQ's repo with the winehq-devel package. You can also find the dev dependencies listed on the Fedora page. On Arch, AUR has the wine-git package that should work. On NixOS or other distros/OSes where you have the Nix package manager installed, you can get an environment with all of the dependencies setup for you, although in that case, I will at least note that you don't get a multiarch build.

The situation could be better, but given the heroic amount of ridiculous stuff going on in Wine, it's not too bad either. (Not sure how many pure C programs I've seen exposing MSVC C++ ABI interfaces, but Wine is one.)

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>getting all of the dependencies that you want.

I know it's an absolute meme but this is why I like gentoo. You already have the build dependancies for all your software so building it is literally clone,configure,make.

I believe this is the same for Arch and its derivatives.

Not really. You can run makepkg --syncdeps on the ABS PKGBUILD to download all build dependencies for a package, but it won't happen for a normal pacman --sync.

This is ultimately pretty similar to other distros. On Debian derivatives you'd run apt-get build-dep to install all dependencies, and on Nix(OS) you'd run nix-shell --attr to get a shell with the build dependencies available.

It is true that you don’t get every build dep by default, but development headers/libs aren’t separated on Arch like they are on many distros. So I do take slight issue that Arch is on the same level with build deps as Debian, for example. You won’t get the compilers by default, true. But you also don’t need to go through every library and get their headers if you already have the runtimes. That’s a huge difference to me.

As I wrote above, "(Someone is going to tell me it's really easy, just type all these command line commands. That's not what the instructions say.)"

While I know the response you wanted was not one that contradicted this point, it’s hard to not contradict it, because:

- there are precompiled devel releases for some distros, and pkgbuilds/ebuilds for Arch/Gentoo. These options would probably be better for most people. The pages on getting wine definitely do show you how to get the devel version for Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora.

- The actual compilation really is “grab deps, run configure, run make.” If you didn’t generally compile a lot of software manually I could empathize with the subtleties but it is hard for me to say it’s worse than most other software. The page you linked to wasn’t for building it; if you search “building wine” you’ll get the more apt page, https://wiki.winehq.org/Building_Wine which Is large, but it really still boils down to “grab the deps, run configure, run make”

It is unfortunate that it is not somehow even easier, but I also don’t have any suggestions for how it could be improved significantly. Between prebuilt packages and a relatively simple build system, it’s about as easy as any large software is.

Maybe the Wiki could be improved to make it less confusing. But it’s also easy to see why it covers so many of the different things you might want to do. I suspect there’s no silver bullet.

On debian derivatives, you can use `apt-get build-dep` to install all the compile-time dependencies of a package.

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