Here's the thing: Google does not test whether Chromium still works any further than on the tip of their nose. If they can build it to ship Google Chr

Building Chromium at a distro? Here's your copium

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2024-07-09 20:00:09

Here's the thing: Google does not test whether Chromium still works any further than on the tip of their nose. If they can build it to ship Google Chrome, the rest doesn't matter. This is not what a healthy free software project with such an impact should work like. And yet, well, nothing has changed. If you struggle to run Chromium, you will ultimately struggle to use the Chromium-shaped web. Therefore, it's your own problem.

Distributions have for long separately maintained their own sets of patches. This got changed by Gentoo maintainers, who have started putting the most short-living patches in separate git repositories, which many other distros have similarly started to make use of.

What happened then was, Chromium M120 broke it. This release in particular has brought, at the same time, both V8 not building with GCC, and absl::optional becoming replaced with std::optional, which hits a bug in either LLVM clang++ or GNU libstdc++, not sure, activating if the combination of 2 is used.

The outcome? Most distros, including Alpine (maintained by me), Arch, Gentoo, and Fedora, started building the whole Chromium with the source code of LLVM's libc++ that Chromium is shipped with by default. This came at the cost of unbundling dependencies with C++ interfaces, which we do to deduplicate code and effectively provide security fixes in third-party libraries used in packages.