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

[KESHAV P.R.]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 16:33, Lukas Fleischer <archlinux at cryptocrack.de> 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