[aur-general] Status of virtualbox_bin{, _beta, -1, -2, -3} and virtualbox-sun

[Lukas Fleischer]

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