I hope Christian will PM you regarding the VM app updates, because ultimately it is work only he can do.
From my side once again a kind remark:
Regarding RNA World, we are spare-time scientists. No payment, no employment, no whatsoever. And because in parallel to our efforts here, we are otherwise occupied (job, family, other duties), things do not proceed as smoothly as we would like them to proceed.
Updates are therefore usually only applied if they are absolutely vital for the project or, even better, if other tasks can be combined when applying updates such that there is additional positive overall output for the project.
The change to a more recent Virtualbox version, to the best of my knowledge, requires a total de novo build of the corresponding application(s). Please keep that in mind. It is not just like people update Windows by clicking a single button or something like that...
That being said, I can only encourage people to still continue to help us testing and advising things such as Jacob did so nicely above and over the past years. I understand that it is disencouraging when undertaking such efforts and then it takes our project long to implement them. But I think what I described above makes things understandable a bit better.
In fact, I had taken the opportunity this year to apply for a BMBF grant in order to financially foster the RNA World project. Unfortunately, that application had >>300 competitors of which only 13 were finally approved, as the DLR told me. And these lucky 13 projects would also only receive 200.000,- € at maximum over a total period of three years which, in fact, is barely suffcient to hire substantially qualified personnel nowadays. I did not even receive written referee reviews judging my application. Instead, I was asked to call the organizig committee in case I wanted further details...
Well, it sometimes is hard. I believe that my proposal was excellent. And for sure, I won't give up on writing another one as soon as I hear of any further opportunity.
At present, some lab experiments are progressing slowly but promisingly. And I hope that on the basis of the corresponding results, a new grant applicaltion will be possible, soon.
And remember, even these hardcore lab expriments are carryied out on a spare-time basis without any payments. What we are doing here is trying to bring forward science on a purely altruistic basis.
Michael.
Thanks. I tried to do as much as I can do, already, to make it easier to deploy a new version. ie: Testing it, at moderate risk to my 15 in-progress RNA World tasks. I don't think it'd be too hard to deploy, but I don't know for sure. But I do know that VirtualBox 5.1.x development is near completion, and the quicker we can support 5.2.x COM, the better.