Am Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:48:34 +0800 schrieb Ray Rashif <schiv@archlinux.org>:
Why? Because, 'virtualbox-additions' would be just as confusing as 'virtualbox-guest-additions' to a newcomer.
Not quite. When I was a newcomer to virtualbox I first read something about it incl. on upstream's website. There I found the Virtualbox Guest Additions - it was only an iso and nothing else - and found out what they are for. When searching the Arch Linux repos I found virtualbox-additions and virtualbox-guest-additions and I was really confused when virtualbox-guest-additions didn't do what I expected it to do (downloading and storing this iso). And then I asked myself: What is that and what is virtualbox-additions about which I never read anything particularly not on upstream's website? So I think a correct naming scheme is pretty important particularly for newcomers.
To an existing user, a name change may look good, but would introduce a one-time annoying breakage. We cannot justify the extra work and that breakage in order to introduce this name change, since it won't be a problem to maintain the current name (which isn't "wrong") in the first place, while there are no other packages or conditions _requiring_ us to name the package as such.
What breakage? People just have to run once: # pacman -R virtualbox-addtitions # pacman -S virtualbox-guest-additions The same for the other Arch specific guest additions. I think entering those two commands is worth the effort. Do one hard break once and everything is clear. Btw., at least yaourt and I think also pacman itself will inform the user after a system upgrade that the package virtualbox-additions is not in the repos anymore. And an announcement before doing these changes will do the rest. Maybe such an announcement could be added to post_install of virtualbox which is necessary and will be upgraded as usual anyway. If you then add replaces=('virtualbox-additions') to virtualbox-guest-additions everthing is perfect. I don't see a problem.
I don't think you understood this. Versioned replaces will solve replacements (see ML discussion linked in BR).
What is BR? I guess I understood this. I think this is a non-existing issue here, because I'm pretty sure that you won't need a versioned replaces and see above. Heiko