Hello Felix, On Tue, 2011-08-30 at 22:38 +0200, Felix Geyer wrote: > On 30.08.2011 17:29, Michael Thayer wrote: > > What we would certainly > > appreciate would be for released versions of Ubuntu to be able to > > support new versions of VirtualBox as they are released - or to drop the > > Additions installation feature altogether when a release gets to a point > > when Ubuntu no longer wish to update it. > > It might be possible to detect the host VirtualBox version and only > advertise the additions package if both are from the same major release. > Of course this wouldn't cover the case where the VirtualBox host is > upgraded later. I have let this go through my head a bit and come to the conclusion that two things might be helpful here. One would be if we (VirtualBox upstream) could make the Additions officially compatible with (some) previous releases of VirtualBox. With a big question mark over 3D support (which I am less familiar with) I don't think that it would be a major problem for 4.1 Additions to also support VirtualBox 4.0 and possibly 3.2 in an optimal way, though I will have to take a look at that. The other thing would be making use of the version notifier which is built into the Additions and warns if they are older than the VirtualBox version they are running on. The message could be changed slightly in a distribution-specific way, to tell the user how to update the distribution packages, and how to uninstall the packages so that they can install our Additions if the right update is not available.
> The official way to provide updated software for released Ubuntu > versions is through the backports repository. > The policy for that repository however requires that someone actually > tests the package on the old Ubuntu release. > > Sadly at the moment the backports repository isn't integrated into the > GUI package managers. So you have to execute > "sudo apt-get install -t natty-backports virtualbox-guest-utils" > to get the latest version. Firefox somehow gets around this to update to the latest major release even within a single release cycle. Perhaps the same could be done for the Additions? How does it work for other additional hardware drivers? Regards, Michael -- ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG Michael Thayer Werkstrasse 24 VirtualBox engineering 71384 Weinstadt, Germany mailto:[email protected] Hauptverwaltung: Riesstr. 25, D-80992 München Registergericht: Amtsgericht München, HRA 95603 Komplementärin: ORACLE Deutschland Verwaltung B.V. Hertogswetering 163/167, 3543 AS Utrecht, Niederlande Handelsregister der Handelskammer Midden-Niederlande, Nr. 30143697 Geschäftsführer: Jürgen Kunz, Marcel van de Molen, Alexander van der Ven _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] http://vbox.innotek.de/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
