[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] Bug#448749: virtualbox-ose: Please add the host interface utilities to the Debian package

[Frans Pop]

Package: virtualbox-ose
Version: 1.5.2-dfsg-2
Severity: wishlist

Please add VBoxAddIF, VBoxDeleteIF and VBoxTunctl. Having them in the
Debian package would make setting up bridged networking a bit easier and
especially make the installation of an additional package (which has an
unwanted init script and creates an unwanted user account) unnecessary.

I saw in the TODO that the licencing for various utilities still needs
to be checked and I guess these are amongst them.

According to the VirtualBox user manual, the VBoxTunctl command is in fact
'tunctl', which is already in Debian in the package uml-utilities.
I have compared src/VBox/Installer/linux/tunctl.c in the upstream VBox-OSE
tarball with tunctl.c in the Etch version of uml-utilities, and they are
100% identical, including the copyright header in the two files:
/* Copyright 2002 Jeff Dike
 * Licensed under the GPL
 */

The other two commands are in fact a single script clearly written by
innotek itself. Integrating that properly in Debian may take a bit of work
as it uses a config directory in /etc/ and would add a dependency on
bridge-utils, but they could easily be added as examples under
/usr/share/doc.

Hope this helps,
FJP

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-rc1 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages virtualbox-ose depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.105      add and remove users and groups
ii  lib32gcc1                     1:4.2.2-3  GCC support library (32 bit Versio
ii  lib32stdc++6                  4.2.2-3    The GNU Standard C++ Library v3 (3
ii  libc6                         2.6.1-6    GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libc6-i386                    2.6.1-6    GNU C Library: 32bit shared librar
ii  libgcc1                       1:4.2.2-3  GCC support library
ii  libgl1-mesa-glx [libgl1]      7.0.1-2    A free implementation of the OpenG
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.14.2-1   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libidl0                       0.8.8-0.1  library for parsing CORBA IDL file
ii  libqt3-mt                     3:3.3.7-9  Qt GUI Library (Threaded runtime v
ii  libsdl1.2debian               1.2.12-1   Simple DirectMedia Layer
ii  libstdc++6                    4.2.2-3    The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libx11-6                      2:1.0.3-7  X11 client-side library
ii  libxalan110                   1.10-3.1   Provides XSLT support for applicat
ii  libxcursor1                   1:1.1.9-1  X cursor management library
ii  libxerces27                   2.7.0-4    validating XML parser library for 
ii  libxext6                      1:1.0.3-2  X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii  libxt6                        1:1.0.5-3  X11 toolkit intrinsics library

Versions of packages virtualbox-ose recommends:
ii  virtualbox-ose 1.5.2-dfsg-2+192.gef49c32 VirtualBox modules for Linux (kern
ii  virtualbox-ose 1.5.2-dfsg-2              Source for the VirtualBox module

-- no debconf information