Package: virtualbox-ext-pack
Severity: wishlist
Hi,
thank you for maintaining virtual-ext-pack in Debian.
I have a few suggestions on how to improve the user experience but
before sending patches, I would like to ask your opinon on it.
1. keeping vbox-ext files
-------------------------
currently virtualbox-ext-pack downloads the ext-pack file, installs it,
and keeps the downloaded file saved in /usr/share/virtualbox-ext-pack
(~19MB).
imho, packages that download stuff should treat any downloaded files as
'temporary' files, i.e. they should download, install, and remove any
afterwards unsed files to not increase runtime-diskusage unecessary. on
a dpkg-reconfigure, the package should just re-download the necessary files.
would you accept a patch(es) to..
.. remove the ext-pack file after successfull installation of the
extension?
.. if not, would you agree having a debconf question to make it
conditional (so that users get asked, if they want to keep it
which would then default to 'yes')?
2. contents of the ext-pack extension
-------------------------------------
the virtualbox-ext-pack extension currently contains binaries for linux
(amd64, i386), macosx (amd64), solaris (amd64), and windows (amd64,
i386). the extension is only usable together with virtualbox, i.e.
virtualbox uses only the ext-pack parts for the operating system and
architecture it is running on (regardless what guest operating
systems/architectures are used).
on linux (amd64), removing the other-os/arch files saves 35MB (53MB
total size, 18MB amd64 binaries).
ever since the introduction of extensions in virtualbox, these files are
simply gzip compressed tarballs without any cryptographic signature,
only containing a simple manifest (md5/sha256/sha512 checksums).
would you accept a patch(es) to..
.. removing all unecessary other-os/arch files after installation
of the extension?
as a datapoint wrt/ to the extension meta-data: i'm doing this in
my unofficial package for years and never had any problems since
the meta-data in the extension never changed (and if it would,
it could be easily adapted), see:
https://sources.progress-linux.org/distributions/dschinn-backports-extras/packages/virtualbox-extension-pack/tree/debian/rules
.. if not, would you agree having a debconf question to make it
conditional (so that users get asked to multiselect which
other-os/arch files they want to keep which would then default to
all of them)?
Implementing 1. and 2. would decrease the installation size on e.g.
linux/amd64 from 72MB to 18MB, saving 54MB of disk space.
Regards,
Daniel
