Comment 2 for bug 1605337

Gianfranco, thanks for the feedback!

On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 05:49:03PM -0000, LocutusOfBorg wrote:
> Just to make you aware, I already did the split and it is even currently
> waiting on trusty new queue
> (the split was done because the guest packages needs to be rebuilt on top
> of the lts stack, but this is OT).

Ah, I hadn't noticed this - <aside> the SRU NEW queue often goes unnoticed,
please feel free to ping me or another member of the SRU team directly on
#ubuntu-release when you have packages there that need review </aside>

I see that there is split packaging there, but I don't see anything to
handle the splitting of the upstream orig.tar.gz for into free and non-free
parts, which would be a requirement for putting the virtualbox-guest source
in main. Have you looked into this at all? Perhaps if you even have an
analysis of which parts of the source would need to be split, that would
give us a head start on automating this split.

> The question is: if you take over the maintenance, just please take it
> over on Debian too! I really would like to avoid maintain a delta for
> such a huge and problematic package.

Seeing that you are an uploader of the virtualbox package in Debian, I was
indeed quite eager to talk with you about how this might work. Would you be
interested in having this split done in Debian, so that Debian could also
have the virtualbox guest components in main instead of contrib - and so
that this packaging could be kept in sync?

Please note that when I spoke above of cloud or server teams being
responsible for "maintenance", I meant it only in the sense of
Ubuntu-specific maintenance - SRU requirements, security updates, the
occasional temporal delta. They would not be committing to maintain the
package in Debian, and I am 100% in agreement that we should avoid a delta
here between Debian and Ubuntu.

Thanks,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
<email address hidden> <email address hidden>