[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] Can virtualbox-guest-utils & virtualbox-guest-dkms be in main?

[Gianfranco Costamagna]

Hi,

>> Hi pkg-virtualbox-devel,

>> 
>> I was looking at the Debian Cloud project's Vagrant images, which
>> historically have used the virtualbox package for the guest
>> additions.
>> 
>> Recently, the Vagrant images have switched away from bundling
>> virtualbox guest additions due to to virtualbox-guest-utils &
>> virtualbox-guest-dkms being in contrib.
>> 
>> But... the only reason that guest additions are in contrib is that an
>> *unrelated* part of the virtualbox source package requires a non-
>> dfsg-free compiler.
>> 
>> So... is there any interest in splitting the virtualbox package into
>> one part that *can* be in main, and another part that can be in
>> contrib? That would help me out.
>> 
>> I can possibly spend time looking into that, for what it's worth. But
>> I did want to find out if there's interest in merging such a patch
>> before starting the work, as well as finding out if there's something
>> I'm overlooking.
>>
>
>That'll help. Gianfranco has been maintaining it all alone. And I've
>been moving away from VBox lately. So any help is welcome. Infact, if
>you really have stakes in VBox, you may want to co-maintain it.


hi, splitting the package in two has many benefit and much much more work.

e.g. I could upload new vbox releases in stable releases just because of CVE bugs,
probably decoupling vbox in two packages will make impossible to update them both
and also will make impossible to backport them in the short term.

I could like this change, but maintaining it takes a lot of time, and I really don't
have that much anymore
(specially due to backports/uploads into debian stable releases of new versions) I keep the
packaging changes minimal, to avoid issues in stable debian releases.

So, if you want to draft a patch (or even a workflow), I can consider, but probably if
I will continue to be the only one maintaining it in stable, oldstable, oldoldstable, unstable,
stretch, ubuntu, and ubuntu trusty/vivid/wily/xenial, I don't think I'll be able to perform
large changes.

sorry for the late answer,

Gianfranco