Wine-Staging 1.8 Released, Introduces WUSA Support

Just days after the release of Wine 1.8, the Wine-Staging 1.8 release is now available.

Wine-Staging continues to be an experimental proving grounds for Wine patches not yet ready to be accepted mainline. Wine-Staging didn't follow Wine 1.8 stable's feature freeze process for the past few weeks, so there still are a few new features to find, but they did go lighter on what was merged.

One of the prominent experimental features of Wine-Staging 1.8 is support for the Windows Update Standalone Installer (WUSA) for installing Windows updates in Wine. While this sounds odd, this isn't meant for patching your Windows system but rather as a means for being able to access application updates that Microsoft sends down via Windows Update files.

With this initial WUSA support in Wine-Staging 1.8, it's possible to more easily install Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5. It's also going to be easier for installing Internet Explorer updates and other program updates in the future. There still are some bugs in this early implementation, but the Wine-Staging developers continue to make progress.

More details on Wine-Staging 1.8's release can be found via the announcement posted a short time ago their project site.