You might be interested in checking out some of the work I did on
packaging vmware. Debian diffs are available from
<http://robots.org.uk/debian/unofficial/vmware/>.
I tried to integrate as much with Debian as possible. Easy stuff
included desktop entries, doc-base registration, and using existing
packages where they already exist in Debian (e.g., point the user at
dhcp3-server instead of shipping VMware's modified version).
Harder stuff included network setup, and replacing the init script with
if-{pre-post}-{up,down}.d scripts, which allows the user to configure
their virtual networks by editing /etc/networking/interfaces.
The biggest problems I had were:
* ifupdown fails to handle the failure of
if-{pre,post}-{up,down}.d scripts. Instead, the interface is
blindly set into the target state.
* VMware seem to make a lot of modifications to the libraries they
use, and some of them are no longer binary compatible. Getting
vmware to work at all without segfaulting took a lot of trial
and error. In the end it works, but the user's GTK theme is not
applied to vmware's controls.
--
Sam Morris
http://robots.org.uk/
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