[vbox-dev] [PATCH] UDPTunnel : new network interface backend to allow using this to link to GNS3 and QEMU instances over the network

[Bernhard Froehlich]

On Fri, 13 May 2011 11:18:01 +0200, Klaus Espenlaub wrote:
> On 13.05.2011 00:08, Mario Lobo wrote:
>> On Thursday 12 May 2011 18:58:57 Alexey Eromenko wrote:
>>
>>  > Why no one sends patches upstream, here ? (ofc. they must not break
>>  > other platforms)
>>
>> Bernhard is doing a wonderful job with the ports. I'm sure he has his
>> (good) reasons for doing it the way he has. It has been working
>> perfectly because I've been following bluelife for quite a while now and
>> the ports have always compiled and run flawlessly.

Well, it's usually not so smooth for us compared to all supported
platforms
because we usually start our big testing efforts with the community
after a release was done. So it happens that bugs are found and fixed
after a release and then we just include the patch in our port instead
of waiting for the next release. There are also regularly patches that
come from the FreeBSD community and we include in the port but usually
at
the same time we push them upstream.

Additionally there are sometimes patches that fix a particular build
problem for exotic configurations but the patch is just a hack to get
it
build. Such a patch will never be pushed upstream but we report the
problem
instead.

We currently maintain 2 sets of virtualbox ports (in the future 3).
These
without any suffix are the current stable versions which is 4.0.6 right
now.
Those with -devel suffix are svn snapshots which is r36702 right now
and is
updated about once a month at least.

>> Probably the few remaining code patches would break other OSs.
> 
> Not sure about that in all cases. He pushes things upstream
> regularly, when they are sufficiently tested.
> 
> In the long run there should be no reason to have significant changes
> in the ports.

Yes, that is what we try to do. We don't want to maintain our own
patches
but we also cannot live without them.

-- 
Bernhard Fröhlich
http://www.bluelife.at/