Noah Meyerhans <noahm@debian.org> wrote: > On Sun, Dec 05, 2021 at 07:58:17PM +0300, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote: >> >> So what's happening with chromium in both sid and stable? I saw on d-release that it was removed from testing (#998676 and #998732), with a discussion about ending security support for it in stable. >> > >> > The problem really is lack of maintenance. In my opinion, chromium deserves an active *team* to support it in Debian. <...> The security team doesn't have the bandwidth to do it themselves, they need a team to help them. >> >> Sorry for a silly question, but whatʼs so wrong with the build done by linuxmint.com [1], so Debian needs a whole team to duplicate their effort? Itʼs for Debian 10 (i. e. oldstable) as of now, but works fine at Sid in my (limited) experience. > > Well, you can start with the fact that the Mint chromium source packages don't even include the chromium source, If the fact is that their ad-hoc downloader does not generate orig tarball, I fail to see much trouble here. They are using the same `chromium-browser-official` releases. > let alone the sources for all the other things they build (NodeJS, and more). Well, they actually do not build NodeJS, but use a blob from nodejs.org (just like Google does). Nothing good, of course, but I hope itʼs not the case that Chromium build fails when NodeJS is actually built from sources that are supposed to correspond to that blob? Or had nobody tried that? If the latter, why? Is there some policy, that mandates that preinstalled node(1) must be used? > One lesson we may take from Mint, though, is that it's not worth trying to patch Chromium as much as we'd like. Anything that we can do to simplify the Chromium packaging will help us keep the package up-to-date, which in turn will help us keep our users safer. In my opinion, we should be pretty aggressive about dropping as many of the Chromium patches as possible, even if that means we link against bundled/vendored dependencies. Indeed. As a passer-by I really wonder why that path had been taken at all in the first place. If Chromium devs are into hard-pinning dependencies, they presumably have good reasons to do that. > Legal/licensing considerations are still important and I don't know if we actually *can* ship builds based on the bundled stuff. I cannot imagine how it can be illegal for Debian what is legal for Google or Flathub in this case. Were there some prior discussions about that?
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