[vbox-dev] Fuduntu distribution patch

[Klaus Espenlaub]

On 14.05.2012 14:07, Andrew Wyatt wrote:
> On 05/13/2012 03:58 PM, Alexey Eromenko wrote:
>> Quite nice to see patches to support new OSes out there :)
>>
>> What's the general policy ? (considering there are like 400+ distributions...)
>>
> That's a good question, the only thing I gleaned from the Wiki was that
> these sorts of contributions were welcomed. :D

The policy right now is that we don't really appreciate such "add my 
favorite OS" contributions, especially if you completely ignore the 
structure of the existing OS type identifiers (0xTVB00 - T=OS type, 
V=variant, B=bitness).  Fuduntu is clearly not a new OS type, because 
it's yet another Linux distro. This policy is also the reason why Haiku 
(which IS a different OS type) wasn't added so far. Since only 16 
variants of each OS type can be represented this way it's clearly not 
capable of handling 400+ distributions.

Instead we need something generic which scales to any past and future OS 
(and variant), which the current approach can't ever do.

The basic idea is that VBox comes with a few pre-defined OS types, and 
the rest is left to the user. It should be possible to add new entries 
to the list of OS types, including icon, default VM settings and so on. 
Those new OS types are kept both in VirtualBox.xml (so that one can 
easily create such an OS type without having a VM of this type), and 
later copied to every VM config using this type (so that it gets 
automatically set up when a VM is copied to a different system).

This needs API and config file changes, and I'd really appreciate 
contributions in this area. It's of course significantly harder than 
hacking the existing solution to have another entry in the global tables.

Klaus