[vbox-dev] Co-existence of distribution-installed Guest Additions and Oracle-provided ones

[Michael Thayer]

Hello Gianfranco,

Here comes my latest brain-dump on this subject.

16.06.2017 11:46, Michael Thayer wrote:
[Discussion of how best to handle removing distribution Additions.]
> I would prefer this to be: if /usr/sbin/vbox-uninstall-guest-additions
> exists, execute it, and only install if it exits successfully.
> Otherwise we have to execute dpkg -l, rpm whatever, pacman whatever,
> emerge whatever, and many more that I do not know.  Since you do not
> wish to uninstall the Additions packages automatically, your
> /usr/sbin/vbox-uninstall-guest-additions would print a message like "You
> can uninstall the distribition version of the Guest Additions by
> executing apt-get remove ..." and exit with exit code 2.  If you ever
> reach a point where you know you are tracking the most recent Additions
> (including moving to the next major release when it is available and
> declared stable enough) then your
> /usr/sbin/vbox-uninstall-guest-additions would print nothing and return 1.

Would you feel more comfortable if you put a command to remove the
Additions (the non-kernel parts of course) in
/usr/sbin/vbox-uninstall-guest-additions, but we did not execute it
automatically but asked the user for confirmation first?

Regards
Michael

>> dpkg -l *can't* return the guest-additions-iso installed, because installed in the host, not guest :p
>>
>> does this sounds right?
>>
>>
>> from your perspective checking if the dpkg package is installed is easier, from my side some more tricky :)
>>
>> G.-- -- 
Michael Thayer | VirtualBox engineer
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