[vbox-dev] Inclusion of the Guest Additions in Ubuntu 11.10 by default

[Michael Thayer]

Hello Felix and all,

As an update to our discussion about how to reconcile distribution 
versions of the Additions with Oracle's, I have taken care of both of 
the points below.  Any future 4.1 releases will have a modified version 
notifier on non-Oracle builds which advise the user that if their 
distribution/distributor no longer provides current versions of the 
Additions they should remove the distribution version and install ours. 
  Distributors should feel free to customise the message.  And we have 
also fixed the only problem we could find which would cause problems 
when 4.1 Additions were used with a 4.0 host - the Guest Execution 
functionality was not working in this case.  The 3D ABI is compatible 
between 4.0 and 4.1, and we will try our best not to keep it compatible 
in future.  So as of any future 4.1 or later releases it will be safe 
for distributions to supply the most recent version of the Additions for 
use with any host version as of 4.0.  (Just in case there is any doubt, 
we will only be testing this for Linux guests, although chances are good 
that it will apply for other guests too.)

Regards,

Michael

On 08/31/2011 11:17 AM, Michael Thayer wrote:
> I have let this go through my head a bit and come to the conclusion that
> two things might be helpful here.  One would be if we (VirtualBox
> upstream) could make the Additions officially compatible with (some)
> previous releases of VirtualBox.  With a big question mark over 3D
> support (which I am less familiar with) I don't think that it would be a
> major problem for 4.1 Additions to also support VirtualBox 4.0 and
> possibly 3.2 in an optimal way, though I will have to take a look at
> that.  The other thing would be making use of the version notifier which
> is built into the Additions and warns if they are older than the
> VirtualBox version they are running on.  The message could be changed
> slightly in a distribution-specific way, to tell the user how to update
> the distribution packages, and how to uninstall the packages so that
> they can install our Additions if the right update is not available.

-- 
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