

Portable-VirtualBox needs a new main developer - runarb
http://www.vbox.me/blog/portable-virtualbox-needs-a-new-main-developer/

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csense
I wasn't aware that portable VirtualBox was possible; I thought it required
some kind of drivers to run at usable speeds, which would require
administrative privileges and installing junk in the Windows directories. Or
maybe I'm thinking of the "qemu accelerator" that existed a while ago.

Is there any chance of getting portableness into mainline?

IMHO every application should be self-contained in its own directory, i.e.
"portable." Spewing stuff all over the registry, home directory, and Windows
directory isn't good.

Linux is actually just as bad as Windows in regard to applications that put
pieces of themselves everywhere. Part of the reason InstallShield(R) wizards
and package managers exist is because people insist on complicating things
like this.

My dpkg -L firefox says that the Firefox package has data in:

    
    
      /usr/lib/firefox-addons
      /usr/lib/firefox
      /usr/bin/firefox
      /usr/share/man/man1/firefox.gz
      /usr/share/doc/firefox
      /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
      /usr/share/lintian
      /usr/share/apport
      /usr/share/pixmaps/firefox
      /etc/firefox
      $HOME/.mozilla
    

And that's not all, there are also the firefox-gnome-support and firefox-
locale-en, AFAIK required for Firefox to function, which also probably spew
things everywhere.

Is this really necessary? Is it too much to ask to just have everything you
need in C:\FIREFOX or /opt/firefox?

I recently had a rant here on this subject which got downvoted, so I know I'm
playing with fire by bringing this up.

~~~
teknolust
Once upon a time a Linux distro attempted to solve this problem,
<http://www.gobolinux.org/>

Sadly I don't think it gets much in the ways of updating anymore.

------
dkroy
You should throw this up on github, bitbucket or codeplex. DVCS always seems
to work best for this type of development.

~~~
hazelnut
right, open source your stuff and the community is willing to help you

~~~
runarb
It is already open source and available at Sourceforge:
<http://www.vbox.me/source-code/> .

GitHub are probably much hotter then Sourceforge this days, but Sourceforge
was what we used back then :) Do you think that it is worth the effort to
change to GitHub? Will it be easier to attract more developers then?

~~~
skore
It absolutely will. Sourceforge is adequate if you want to manage a project
within an established team. But Github really unlocks an entire community to
participate, shattering the barrier of entry to anybody who wants to chip in.

~~~
runarb
Thank you for the tips. Sounds like a good idea to move to GitHub. Especially
do I like that non developers can edit files directly from the web interface.
I get frequently updates on the language files for example. Had been nice if
the authors of them could commit the changes directly to the repository.

Any other suggestions?

