[CentOS-devel] Packaging the VirtualBox Guest Additions?

[Jim Perrin]

On 08/15/2016 07:39 AM, Laurentiu Pancescu wrote:
> We occasionaly get complaints from users that our official Vagrant
> images do not include the VirtualBox Guest Additions.  We do not include
> them because the CentOS repositories do not have any package for
> VirtualBox.  Packaging it would probably require a significant amount of
> work - the Debian source package shows quite a number of first-level
> dependencies, probably not all already available in CentOS. [1]  I'm
> also not sure if packaging the full VirtualBox is even desirable. [2]
> 


I don't think we need (or want) to package up all of virtualbox, no.

> The alternative would be to package just the Guest Additions (which have
> considerably fewer build dependencies), to be able to include them in
> the Vagrant images.  Two VirtualBox developers told me in #vbox-devel
> that the source code already supports building just the Guest Additions,
> and it's actually used for generating the official download images: one
> should simply invoke "kmk VBOX_ONLY_ADDITIONS=1", or, I quote: 'kmk
> VBOX_ONLY_ADDITIONS=1 packing to produce the ISO, which will only be for
> one platform and bit count.'  They also believe we should be able to get
> away with simply providing the binary modules, since our kernels have a
> stable ABI (the upstream Guest Additions ISO, as well as the Debian
> packages, require DKMS and the development tools and kernel headers,
> which would considerably increase the size of our Vagrant images).  We
> would probably need to incorporate some functionality from their
> installer at RPM build time, to get just the binary modules.

This is something to look into, as I think it might be worthwhile. I'll
work on chasing this down to make sure that we're okay license-wise if
someone wants to take a crack at putting together a specfile/src.rpm for
the build.


-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
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