[vbox-dev] Guest Additions, co-existence of distribution and upstream versions

[Frank Mehnert]

Larry,

On Wednesday 11 November 2015 10:40:27 Larry Finger wrote:
> [...]
>
> Sorry that I did not answer in time. As I am new in as maintainer of
> VirtualBox in openSUSE, I do not understand all the ramifications of what
> you are proposing. The only VB modules we install by default are the guest
> additions. They are necessary with openSUSE in a guest machine, and due to
> an unknown bug, they are also installed in real machines as well. If
> problems show up between your packaging and ours, I will be sure to contact
> you for help. :)

following problem: Any pre-installed component of VirtualBox Guest
Additions (GA) can conflict with update GA the user intents to install.
The user might want to install new GA to have bug fixes or to have new
features. The new GA should uninstall all components of the old GA,
including the kernel modules. Otherwise the new GA try to use the
kernel modules of the old GA which might not work. Btw, on openSUSE
it seems to be very important to re-build the initrd after the kernel
modules are updated but that's not directly related.

In his initial posting Michael asked how to change the structure of the
GA built by Oracle (and shipped as the VBoxGuestAdditions.iso) without
interfering the packaging system (too much).

Kind regards,

Frank
-- 
Dr.-Ing. Frank Mehnert | Software Development Director, VirtualBox
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