[vbox-dev] Building the guest additions ISO

[Klaus Espenlaub]

John Whitley wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm looking for instructions on either building the guest additions ISO 
> from the SVN tree, or otherwise extracting the guest additions code in a 
> form I can package as an ISO manually.  I note that the ISO wasn't 
> produced by the standard build, and the additions* targets apparently 
> rely on private servers.  I'm working on adding symlink support to 
> shared folders and will need to be able to test guest-side changes.

Building the complete iso (for all supported platforms) requires quite a 
few systems to do the staging. Also, the OSE source tree doesn't contain 
installer code (neither for the base product nor for additions).

But the tree contains the necessary scripts to build/load additions 
binaries individually.

If I were you I'd configure the guest which you use for debugging with 
some network share to get access to your build directory. You can use 
that to achieve a bearable turnaround time until things work. Just keep 
in mind that all host/guest combinations have to work correctly with 
symlinks. Especially windows might need custom treatment.

Once that's working you can worry about packaging - which is not a 
problem if you contribute the changes to Sun.

Klaus