[vbox-dev] Co-existence of distribution-installed Guest Additions and Oracle-provided ones

[Gianfranco Costamagna]

Hello,

>Hello all (especially distribution package maintainers),
>Hans de Goede from Redhat suggested a nice simple solution for stopping 
>our Additions and distribution Additions packages from treading on each 
>other's feet: a well-known file - 
>/usr/sbin/vbox-uninstall-guest-additions - which can be executed to 
>uninstall the currently installed Additions, say by executing "dnf 
>remove virtualbox-guest-additions" or whatever is appropriate.  This is 
>implemented in our Additions as of public svn r66387[1] and should be in 
>any future 5.1 series Additions too.  It would be great if distribution 
>packages could also add this.  It does not need to remove kernel modules 
>which are part of a distribution kernel package as long as they are not 
>in a location which clashes with ours (ours live in 
>/lib/modules/<version/misc).

>[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/changeset/66387/vbox/trunk

so, if I read correctly, before installing our guest-stuff we should check if
that file is available, and blindly call it?

I'm not sure about the consequences of this, e.g. should I replace that file
at the end, so you do the same when the Debian version is installed?
Should I also check the content of the file, to undestand if that
file is owned by a previous version of the packaged guest- tool?

I mean, in upgrades that file will be always available, because AFAIU I have to
provide it to you too.

I'm not confortable in implementing such a change without having a clear and common
way of doing it.

I see lots of corner cases that will probably make things worse if not correctly implemented.

I have to admit, I mostly never received bug reports because of such issue, so I would like
to be really sure about such changes (and I usually update virtualbox to stable Debian/Ubuntu releases
too, so I have to triple check each change for stability).

Has any other packager already implemented such a solution?

thanks, and sorry for the late answer,

Gianfranco
(Debian and Ubuntu vbox maintainer)