In case any packager is interested about VBox Guest Additions, I just read this off of the vbox-dev mailing list. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello Felix and all, As an update to our discussion about how to reconcile distribution versions of the Additions with Oracle's, I have taken care of both of the points below. Any future 4.1 releases will have a modified version notifier on non-Oracle builds which advise the user that if their distribution/distributor no longer provides current versions of the Additions they should remove the distribution version and install ours. Distributors should feel free to customise the message. And we have also fixed the only problem we could find which would cause problems when 4.1 Additions were used with a 4.0 host - the Guest Execution functionality was not working in this case. The 3D ABI is compatible between 4.0 and 4.1, and we will try our best not to keep it compatible in future. So as of any future 4.1 or later releases it will be safe for distributions to supply the most recent version of the Additions for use with any host version as of 4.0. (Just in case there is any doubt, we will only be testing this for Linux guests, although chances are good that it will apply for other guests too.) Regards, Michael On 08/31/2011 11:17 AM, Michael Thayer wrote: I have let this go through my head a bit and come to the conclusion that two things might be helpful here. One would be if we (VirtualBox upstream) could make the Additions officially compatible with (some) previous releases of VirtualBox. With a big question mark over 3D support (which I am less familiar with) I don't think that it would be a major problem for 4.1 Additions to also support VirtualBox 4.0 and possibly 3.2 in an optimal way, though I will have to take a look at that. The other thing would be making use of the version notifier which is built into the Additions and warns if they are older than the VirtualBox version they are running on. The message could be changed slightly in a distribution-specific way, to tell the user how to update the distribution packages, and how to uninstall the packages so that they can install our Additions if the right update is not available. -- ORACLE Deutschland B.V. & Co. KG Michael Thayer Werkstrasse 24 VirtualBox engineering 71384 Weinstadt, Germany mailto:michael.thayer@oracle.com Hauptverwaltung: Riesstr. 25, D-80992 München Registergericht: Amtsgericht München, HRA 95603 Komplementärin: ORACLE Deutschland Verwaltung B.V. Hertogswetering 163/167, 3543 AS Utrecht, Niederlande Handelsregister der Handelskammer Midden-Niederlande, Nr. 30143697 Geschäftsführer: Jürgen Kunz, Marcel van de Molen, Alexander van der Ven -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org