[vbox-dev] development revision numbering

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Hello John,

On 2023-09-14 17:11, John Lumby via vbox-dev wrote:
> Long ago I was advised how to obtain sourcecode and extpack in order to build a working VBox for a bleeding-edge linux kernel :   in brief
> 
>    checkout the open source from https://www.virtualbox.org/svn/vbox/trunk
>   download the matching extpack from  Testbuilds  "Development snapshots"
> 
> This has always worked infallibly ,  most recently for kernel 6.5.3 (enormous kudos to you maintainers for keeping so up to date).
> 
> However  -    I would like to track the revision number of each build I make,      and I am baffled to find that there is no single,  consistent,   revision number between the source I get in step 1 and the extpack's announced revision number.        They are not even close.
> 
> E.g.  -
>       yesterday I checked out the source and the last line of output stated
>        Checked out revision 100800
> 
> I then go to development snapshots and find the current extpack is revision number 158812

The cause of this is that you're looking at revisions from two repositories.

1. The one with higher revision number is the one internal to Oracle 
(containing also the closed source bits, and additionally the release 
branches). No one outside Oracle will ever get access there.

2. The other is the public VirtualBox repository. It is a subset of the 
previous one, containing purely the open source code for "trunk". 
Unavoidably this repository will have fewer changes (not having the 
changes related to the branches, and also not having the changes related 
to closed source code).

Note that updates to the public VirtualBox repository are triggered 
manually (in the sense that someone with the necessary access rights 
kicks it off, the whole "extracting the relevant changes" is done using 
a few tools). So it can be static for some weeks which won't be the case 
for the internal repository.

Uploading test builds (because that's also relevant in this context, as 
that's what you use for the Extension Pack) is also triggered manually, 
based on the latest available builds from our automated build system.

> Is there even such a thing as "current revision number of VirtualBox"?   And, if so, how do I find out what it is?    Of course,  I don't mind if the two numbers are off by a very small amount because of the time between my step 1 and step 2,   but clearly 158812 - 100800 is not a small amount.

Internally at Oracle we'd have information about which changeset number 
in the internal repository corresponds to which changeset number in the 
public VirtualBox repository. This information doesn't make it to 
virtualbox.org at all so far. Would be a bigger project to introduce any 
way of querying this information.

Hope this clarifies the picture...

Cheers,
Klaus

> 
> Cheers,    John Lumby