Wine 7.0 Code Freeze To Begin In Early December

As expected when writing about Wine 6.22 yesterday that the annual stable release dance was likely upon us, plans were laid out today for that Wine 7.0 release.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has laid out plans for releasing Wine 7.0 in January as is tradition. For that to happen, the plan is to have Wine 6.23 in two weeks and one week after that to mark the start of the code freeze. After Wine 6.23 with any remaining features, Wine 7.0-rc1 will come one week later on 10 December with the hard code freeze in place.

Weekly release candidates of Wine 7.0 are then expected from 10 December through January whenever the official 7.0.0 release is deemed ready. If traditions hold, that Wine 7.0 stable release should appear in the latter half of January.

We'll see what remaining Wine 7.0 features are prepared in time, which will be interesting to see if the likes of the FUTEX2 support for use on Linux 5.16+ lands for this annual stable release. For most gamers/enthusiasts though the stable Wine releases aren't all that important with Wine's bi-weekly development releases tending to trend in the right direction for improvements over regressions and Steam Play's Proton regularly re-basing against Wine upstream.