Comment 15 for bug 1558480

I don't really know the Ubuntu packages, so what I offer is mainly to help explaining what Debian does in its wine packages. Whatever ...

1.)
I assume the wineprefixes, notably the default prefix in $HOME/.wine, would just continue to work. Since the WoW64 changes I made in January there shouldn't be any Debian specifics left to take care of, and I assume none to be in Ubuntu.

2.)
Gecko/Mono is broken in the current Debian packages (wine and wine-development), but I committed a fix for that (still disabling the automatic download on purpose, but allowing for automatic installation of already downloaded gecko/mono installers). Ubuntu just has to drop disable/addons-download.patch if it also wants to restore the download of installers, or preferrably offer these packages in the required version (Debian is generally doing so, but is currently behind on that).

3.)
The main difference that I assume for Ubuntu is the Desktop integration. All Debian does is to ship "wine-binfmt" with /usr/share/binfmts/wine. But as of now there is no activation of this (see https://bugs.debian.org/819255, not sure if the maintainer wants to change that).
"wine-development" doesn't work yet with "wine-binfmt" (although it suggests it). This requires me finally implementing the Debian alternatives system (eta 1-2 months).
More desktop integration of wine-development has already been requested in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine-development/+bug/1576326. I'm unlikely to work on that.

So the main issue (1) is already dealt with. All you need should be to transition from one package set to the new one (provides, breaks, replaces, ...).

However I imagine (2) and (3) are blockers for Ubuntu.
Maybe you want to replace Debian with Ubuntu in patches/version-string.patch.