[arch-general] virtualbox additions package naming

[Ray Rashif]

On 20 July 2011 04:54, Heiko Baums <lists at baums-on-web.de> wrote:
> I have followed it. But I also told you that it's not a problem in my
> opinion if people have to do some manual work for upgrading it once.
> Just post an announcement about the changes to the News section of the
> website, the mailing lists and/or the wiki.
>
> This is only necessary once.

We all agree on the proper naming for that. It's just that it has
become a technical problem now due to the initial naming, and to work
around that technical problem, there's not enough justification. If it
were part of a larger software group, like Python and its modules,
then there'd be ample justification (like "consistency").

Why? Because, 'virtualbox-additions' would be just as confusing as
'virtualbox-guest-additions' to a newcomer. 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.

> Nevertheless, do you really need versioned replaces? I mean Arch Linux
> is a rolling release distro which contains only one version (the
> latest) of each package in the repos. So you can assume that people
> always use the most up-to-date versions.

I don't think you understood this. Versioned replaces will solve
replacements (see ML discussion linked in BR).


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