On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 16:33, Lukas Fleischer <[email protected]> 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
