On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 16:33, Lukas Fleischer wrote:

Hey, folks!

In consequence to recent deletion requests concerning the pre-built VirtualBox packages in the AUR, I decided that we should agree on what to do with them in consensus. The status quo is that the PUEL (Personal Use and Evaluation License) edition of VirtualBox is gone as of release 4.0, since people can now use additional features with "virtualbox" from [community] and a closed-source extension pack [1]. Instead, Oracle provides a pre-built VirtualBox package as the "successor" of the PUEL edition which, however, is exactly the same thing as the package in [community]. Afaik, the only difference is that the [community] package is compiled by us whereas the binary package is built by Oracle.

We currently have at least six source tarballs based on that pre-built version in the AUR:

- virtualbox_bin [2] - virtualbox_bin_beta [3] - virtualbox_bin-1 [4] - virtualbox_bin-2 [5] - virtualbox_bin-3 [6] - virtualbox-sun [7]

virtualbox_bin-{1,2,3} are legacy packages. They still have a considerable number of votes.

Following points emerged during earlier discussions:

Pro deletion: - There shouldn't be any packages in the AUR that provide exactly the  same stuff as another package in the official repos. - The [community] package is preferable to the AUR packages as it is  maintained by some Arch dev and contains Arch-specific patches. People  might also be confused by the high number of votes on virtualbox_bin.

Against: - Why delete them? These packages still have AUR maintainers, upstream's  still active, they don't break things, they ain't real dupes. - The binary packages can be used to check for upstream faults in case  the official virtualbox package breaks.

Any further opinions?

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=44761 [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=9753 [3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=27339 [4] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=19613 [5] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=27853 [6] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=44826 [7] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=31996

As a user, I would say - Leave virtualbox_bin_beta as it is, since oracle does release beta tarball (but with no announcement regarding any beta release - http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/LATEST-BETA.TXT ). Versions {1,2,3} is your call. I support the second reason in 'Against' argument. I prefer to have any one package - virtualbox_bin or virtualbox-sun - to be left untouched. Currently there seems to be some in compatibility between qt and virtualbox in community as seen in virtualbox_bin comments. For such isssues Oracle compiled binaries provide a fallback. Regards. Keshav