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

[Michael Thayer]

Hello Gianfranco,

14.06.2017 14:28, Gianfranco Costamagna wrote:
[...]
>> I am not aware of anyone other than us having implemented this yet.  I
>> seem to recall that we discussed this on IRC and came to the conclusion
>> that you could simply refuse to install if that file was found.  I
> 
> Yep I remember that quick discussion :)
> Refusing to install is possible, even if in upgrades sounds like a bad user experience
> (e.g. think about a do-release-upgrade to a new debian/ubuntu release that blocks, and require
> a manual user action)
> 
>> wonder whether dpkg will even allow you to install a package which
>> overwrites a file already on the system, assuming you create it too?
> 
> I guess not. unless I hack a preinst where I check the file content and I delete/overwrite it
> manually
> 
>> The last would be very welcome of course.  Does that sound reasonable?
> 
> I don't think we can handle it that way without many and many hacks :(
> refusing to install might be the best thing to do, on both sides
> (for you it should be simple as
> "dpkg -l |grep virtualbox-guest")

And here we come back to the original problem.  If it were just a case
of Debian, but our installer is designed to work with any distribution,
and it becomes a case of knowing the magical incantations for each,
rather than just executing a script which contains "apt-get remove
virtualbox-guest".  What problems do you see with that?

Regards
Michael
-- 
Michael Thayer | VirtualBox engineer
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