Arch Linux User Repository

There is no version dependency on this package on purpose! You could read comments back from 2011 to understand why.

I will probably remove this dep soon, as virtualbox will dep on virtualbox-host-dkms. Nonetheless, this package takes care of this, to reduce the build time in a chroot; If you prefer build your package with makepkg, I suggest you to use "makepkg -d" instead of creating your own package. That's damn faster. eworm's package is a fork (or duplicate) which bypass the virtualbox official way for installing external modules., by dropping somes files directly inside the virtualobx directory.

Honestly I fail to see the need of virtualbox-host-dkms makedeps too. Correct me if I'm wrong/missing something, but you said you included it only so virtualbox-host-modules won't be triggered to pull the arch stock kernel. But why would this package need to take care of this? Basically this package here tries to "fix" dependencies higher up in the dependency tree. And that part doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Plus this is only the case if someone is using a non-stock kernel to which there is no adapted virtualbox-host-modules package but in that case they wouldn't be able to install virtualbox in the first place. Even if there are such cases that require that "virtualbox-host-dkms trick" I (again, just my personal opinion, I may be wrong) would deem that a special and rare case that should better be treated in a special package, for example virtualbox-ext-oracle-dkms. I was using this package for a long time but this in my (and I assume by far most scenarios) pointless dependency that's always pulled by this package led me to create my own pkgbuild maybe like two years ago when this -dkms shennanigans started. Just set up a new computer here and accidentally installed this package and was reminded of this issue here. I see that this package here and eworm's https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/virtualbox-extension-pack/ are coexisting for a little over a year now. Maybe this package here should be renamed to something like virtualbox-ext-oracle-dkms?

build in a chroot is not an atypical way of building a package. All released packages should be build inside a chroot. Learn to use devtools to do accordingly. Btw it's a makedepends, not a depends of the package. You can still use makepkg -d, if you want to avoid this deps during build.

If it's there for a particular atypical setup (building in chroot), should it be there in the AUR for general consumption? That seems to be adding unnecessary packages to a lot of people's machines when very few of them actually need them.

$ wget -qO- 'http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/4.3.10/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.3.10.vbox-extpack'|md5sum 25b70fa71d9320e2836b9be138457ee0 - Good from my home. Bad from my office. There is probably a replication issue between Oracle mirrors. I already see that in the past. The md5sum is correct. @djhaines: Right, it doesn't require it to build. But the virtualbox deps pull virtualbox-host-modules, which pull linux kernel. Putting this makedeps deps avoid a kernel to be fetched when I build the binary package in a chroot.

I'm pretty sure that this shouldn't require virtualbox-host-dkms to build. I note that the PKGBUILD states "use virtualbox-host-dkms dep to avoid to pull linux kernel in chroot", but that (A) doesn't make a lot of sense and (B) doesn't seem to be true, as I've commented out the makedepends and it still seems to work without any issues.