On Wed, Jun 7, 2023 at 9:09 AM Jeff Gazso <jeff.ga...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm in the process of getting Gentoo dev status. I'm willing to consider > maintaining www-client/chromium. I have a high core count rack server that > should be able to handle the build process quite well. Can you give me a list > of common pain points? If that is a long conversation feel free to email me > directly.
I'll start by giving a brief overview of the Chromium release process upstream: - 3 release channels: stable, beta, dev/unstable - Major development occurs on the master branch. - Once a month, a new major version is forked from master, and this becomes the "dev channel" release series. - Over the next several weeks in the dev channel the major version is tested and fixed, with releases roughly once per week. - Eventually, the branch is promoted to the "beta channel". - A similar process occurs in the beta channel, with weekly releases until the major version is finally promoted to the "stable channel". - The stable channel sees around 1 to 2 releases per month, usually with security fixes included. Downstream, we have historically tried to keep up with all 3 channels. Keeping the dev channel working is the biggest challenge. The other channels usually just involve build testing and the occasional backport of fixes. Common problems: - Across the 3 channels, you are looking at roughly 12 releases per month. That's a lot of churn. - The dev channel never compiles the first time you try it. There are always problems to fix. - Upstream only really supports using their bundled toolchain (an LLVM git snapshot on Ubuntu). On Gentoo, we try to make it work with the stable release of GCC and LLVM/clang. - Upstream likes to use modern C++ features, and they write C++ code that tends to break or is unsupported on stable releases of GCC and LLVM. - Upstream bundles many libraries. The Gentoo ebuild has some logic to unbundle a number of these, but maintaining it is a pain. - Using the bundled libraries sometimes is problematic, especially on non-x86-64 targets which upstream doesn't support well. - Upstream cross-compiles their ARM binaries, whereas we compile natively on Gentoo. This sometimes causes conflicts. I'm probably missing some things, but I think that should give you some idea of what you're in for. :-)
