[aur-general] [Bulk] Re: virtualbox-extension-pack vs. virtualbox-ext-oracle

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 2014-08-05 at 08:25 +0200, Christian Hesse wrote:
> I do not agree.
> This is pretty stupid. My package does not hurt anybody and a lot of
> people do want to use it.

It does offend the Arch Linux policy. I asked to downgrade VBox for the
repositories, assumed a bug I experience should be an issue for others
too, done at general mailing list after reporting the bug.

"Comment by Sébastien Luttringer (seblu)-Monday,04 August 2014,22:53 GMT
You could try to remove the oracle extension or install it correctly,
without the underground way of virtualbox-extension-pack. That could
help to remove the extension from the equation.

In both case, the issue seems to not be package related and you should
report that upstream." - https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/41424

IOW, if there's a bug caused by upstream's current version, that makes
the software useless, Arch will provide broken software by the official
repositories. The reason why I often heard from Debian users, that for
their needs Arch isn't stable enough. IMO Arch is much more stable, than
Debian is, but indeed, a few packages from time to time are very
annoying and on my machine those packages are always the same packages.

The IgnorePkg line for my /etc/pacman.conf is very long and some of
those packages are listed there (not all of them), because I experienced
several times that the versions provided by the repositories are broken.
Other packages are completely removed from my machine, especially those
with a completely ignorant upstream.

Virtualbox is one of those packages listed in the IgnorePkg line for a
very long time. And no, I don't report each bug for each software, I
only report quasi all bugs for audio production software, this already
is very time consuming.

If I find some time, I will use another virtual machine and remove VBox.
That's the freedom we users have got.

For maintainers of packages that don't fit to Arch's policy, perhaps
somebody does provide an open private repository.

While I dislike arch's policy sometimes, it can be completely bad, since
Arch still is the best distro for my needs, so I'll live with the few
things I dislike.