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

[Larry Finger]

On 11/11/2015 11:20 AM, Frank Mehnert wrote:
> 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.

I am not able to envision a situation where the VB modules are needed before the 
user's main disk partition is mounted r/w, thus I have no idea why it would be 
necessary to re-build initrd. As far as I remember, our packaging never puts any 
VB modules there.

> 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).

At this point, I do not know enough to answer the original question, but I'm 
sure we can work our way around any changes.

Larry