chromium on arm (was: About Jessie and missing packages)

[peter green <plugwash@p10link.net>]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 1:21 AM, Umut KARCI <master.repeal@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm very grateful for your work on raspbian, I've been using it since the first pi. But currently I'm having a problem. I've upgraded to Jessie lately. Since yesterday, I can't install chromium browser, I checked mirrors and main repo, source packages are there but no deb packages.

Debian dropped arm support from their chromium packages because I couldn't get it to work when built with the toolchain Debian had at the time (this was in wheezy) and noone else was stepping up to fix it either. It was crashing and I was unable to get a usable backtrace from the crash.

See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=696909 for more information on the many issues we had trying to keep chromium working on armhf.

raspbian wheezy continues to ship the last chromium package I managed to make work. We are not currently shipping a chromium package in raspbian jessie. I don't recall exactly why I removed it but I think that the old version of chromium was no longer compatible with new library versions or something like that.

If there is to be a supported chromium package in raspbian going forward it needs to be dealt with on the Debian side first. Unfortunately chromium seems to be the package from hell.

It looks like since that time that the Debian chromium maintainers have tried to reenable armhf support on two occasions (in versions 28.0.1500.71-1 and 29.0.1547.57-3+exp1) but in both cases the package failed to build. ccing the chromium maintainers to see if they have any comments.

Are you recompiling jessie packages for better armv7 support?

The whole point of raspbian is to provide support for armv6. If you want armv7 optimised packages use Debian armhf.