[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] Some comments about the build process

[Hilko Bengen]

As some of you may recall, I did some work on virtualbox-ose packages
for private use earlier this year. And it seems that I ran into some
of the same headaches that Daniel, Philipp, and Patrick encountered...

`configure' as shipped by upstream doesn't work. Sure, a small patch
fixes this. But do we really need to run that configure script? TBH, I
don't find it particularly useful. Virtualbox' build system allows us
to override AUTOCFG and LOCALCFG at the kmk command line, as well as
some other variables.

The BUILD_PLATFORM_* and BUILD_TARGET_* variables can be detected from
within debian/rules using dpkg-architecture(1) and a few make
functions. I implemented this for my own 1.4.0 packages and it worked
fine on both i386 and amd64.


Since several debhelper scripts are already used, we might as well use
debhelper in the installation process -- dh_link(1), dh_install(1),
dh_installdirs(1), even dh_movefiles(1).


The official (non-free) VirtualBox packages put all the shared
libraries into /usr/lib that the binaries are linked against, making
mucking with LD_LIBRARY_PATH unnecessary. I recall trying to
accomplish this for my packages, but I think I never got anywhere...

(BTW, it's strange that vditool isn't shipped in the official package
for etch.)


Finally, I think I might have found a way to cross-compile Windows
drivers on a Debian system. This would allow us to ship the .iso as
part of the package, but I haven't worked out the details yet.


Looking forward to your comments.

Cheers,
-Hilko