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, let alone the sources for all
the other things they build (NodeJS, and more).
The biggest difficulty, as far as I can tell from my look at Chromium
from several months ago, is that our patch set [1] needs a lot of
attention with every chromium release. Mint doesn't apply any patches
at all to the source, at least none of any real complexity.
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.
Legal/licensing considerations are still important and I don't know if
we actually *can* ship builds based on the bundled stuff. But based on
the number of patches we have to disable various things [2] or build
against system dependencies [3], I can't help but think we'd have an
easier time keeping this package fresh if we could drop some of those.
noah
1. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/blob/master/debian/patches/series
2. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/tree/master/debian/patches/disable
3. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/tree/master/debian/patches/system