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.
