[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] Bug#610010: patches

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Thu, 26 May 2011, Michael Meskes wrote:

> On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 11:35:54PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
>> A set of patches is available at:
>>
>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/emulators/virtualbox-ose/files/
>
> If you want to have them included into the vbox packages please send them in a
> usable way. This URL has files that are not patches but complete scripts but
> alas I have no idea where to install those files.

This is the standard FreeBSD way for storing patches and extra files 
needed to build and run third-party software on FreeBSD, as incorporated 
into the Ports Collection.  It is rather annoying to grab them all at once 
from the web, and would be easier with a checkout of the Ports Collection 
where they are just flat files, viz. 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html

The file patch-foo-bar-baz.ext is generally a patchfile against 
foo/bar/baz.ext in the unpacked tarball from upstream (and since it's a 
patch file, it always includes the full path in the header).

There are also two files vbox*.in, which are template files for RC scripts 
related to this port (things like %%PREFIX%% get subtituted, etc.), which 
are not patch files, though they may be useful for other packaging 
efforts.  (I guess these are the "complete scripts" you refer to?) On 
FreeBSD, they would be installed into /usr/local/etc/rc.d/, though I 
imagine this would end up being /etc/init.d/ for Debian/kFreeBSD with 
additional work to create the appropriate symlinks and such.
I'm also less familiar with the Debian way of configuring initscripts; 
FreeBSD assumes that the user will set variables in /etc/rc.conf or 
similar places, such as vboxheadless_enable="YES" to allow headless 
operation, and the other variables documented in the comments at the top 
of the file.  Since the user-configuration interface is probably 
substantially different, these two files are probably more useful only as 
a guide for what a Debian initscript would need to do rather than for 
direct copy/paste.

That said, this is just helpful information for whomever is actually going 
to do the work, and the bug should remain open until that happens or it 
times out.

-Ben Kaduk