[vbox-dev] question regarding current status of drag and drop

[Alexey Eromenko]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Berin Babcock-McConnell
<spectre683 at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am interested in working on adding file drag and drop functionality to
> VirtualBox.  I've read through the old messages pertaining to this topic
> on the vbox-dev mailing list and I've looked through the current
> development code.  I see that there is some "initial DnD support" in the
> code but there are some critical files missing and it doesn't seem to be
> possible to enable DnD functionality at this point.  So I'm wondering if
> the missing files just don't exist or are they destined for a closed
> source guest addition?  Also given that this is "initial" support, what
> remains to be done?

Hello Berin,

There is NO drag-n-drop code in VirtualBox at all, not open and not closed.
The coding must be done from scratch.

There is a 3rd party project, based on VirtualBox (VMlite
Workstation), that claims to have drag-n-drop, but they are closed
source, and is Windows-only (both host and guest side), so have
limited interest from my side.
In addition to VMlite - there is some VMware open-source code for this
task: "open-vm-tools" for Linux/X11 guests.

NOTE: In case you start with VMware (code is GPLed), Oracle may
disable it from their builds at compile-time (so it will work with
VirtualBox_OSE only).
I will very much appreciate any such effort.

Best wishes,
-- 
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"