Hello Felix and all,
As an update to our discussion about how to reconcile distribution
versions of the Additions with Oracle's, I have taken care of both of
the points below. Any future 4.1 releases will have a modified version
notifier on non-Oracle builds which advise the user that if their
distribution/distributor no longer provides current versions of the
Additions they should remove the distribution version and install ours.
Distributors should feel free to customise the message. And we have
also fixed the only problem we could find which would cause problems
when 4.1 Additions were used with a 4.0 host - the Guest Execution
functionality was not working in this case. The 3D ABI is compatible
between 4.0 and 4.1, and we will try our best not to keep it compatible
in future. So as of any future 4.1 or later releases it will be safe
for distributions to supply the most recent version of the Additions for
use with any host version as of 4.0. (Just in case there is any doubt,
we will only be testing this for Linux guests, although chances are good
that it will apply for other guests too.)
Regards,
Michael
On 08/31/2011 11:17 AM, Michael Thayer wrote:
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.
--
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
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