[vbox-dev] virtualbox should give a more meaningful message when an outdated ext-pack is installed

[Gianfranco Costamagna]

Hello,

>Hm... How about those notices that at least Debian shows prior to
>actual package upgrade? I saw those quite a number of times in cases
>where some breaking change was introduced. In particular the upgrade of
>ca-certificates package will often trigger the screen being presented.
>
>Best regards
>
>P.S.
>You might be doing something close enough already, just can't recall
>exactly at this point :)


I could even enforce an ext-pack version coupled with virtualbox,
actually I already do that for the ext pack package
https://packages.debian.org/unstable/virtualbox-ext-pack

you can install the ext package only if you are running the same minor
vbox version.

This is not ideal, because:
1) I force the virtualbox to work only with ext-pack same minor version
(this is an overkill, breaking changes for ext-pack happens only from
time to time, not each release
2) it works only when the user has installed both from Debian/Ubuntu
(not if you have vbox from repo and ext-pack from upstream)
3) it has been added for 5.1.x, this dependency is not available on the last
Ubuntu LTS (and I don't think I'll add it to the stable packages)

thanks,

Gianfranco