Comparing Chromium Development at Google and Igalia

39 pointssigna116 hours ago11 commentsView on HN

rmunn3 hours ago

Also worth noting https://lwn.net/Articles/1097760/ - Gentoo has given up on building Chromium from source, because upstream "do not test their builds with any of their allegedly 'optional' features disabled" and "[i]n the case of Chromium, keeping all the toggle switches working (despite chronic neglect from upstream) is a monumental, nigh-insurmountable task." One maintainer said he could not possibly test all the combinations of USE flags in the Gentoo build, since his laptop took 15-16 hours to compile Chromium (I presume for just one build, which would have to be repeated 2^N times to test all possible flag combinations).

Much more in the LWN article, I'm not going to quote everything.

Mic922 hours ago

Well. Maybe they should just not have so many flags than?

rmunn1 hour ago

What you're saying is "maybe they should stop being Gentoo". The whole point of Gentoo is customization of your built-from-source packages. (As I recall, but it's been over a decade since I tried it so I might be remembering things wrong). Every optional feature in a piece of software, that would be controlled by some `--with-foo` option to `configure`, gets turned into a USE flag in Gentoo. Packages that have `--with-foo`, `--with-bar`, `--with-baz`, and `--with-quux` then have four USE flags, with 16 possible combinations of enabled or disabled. And the Gentoo maintainers team tries to make sure that all those combinations work, except for ones that obviously contradict each other.

So it's not Gentoo's decision to have so many flags, it's upstream's decision. I bet the Gentoo maintainers would love it if upstream acknowledged "okay, this 'optional' feature isn't really optional any longer". But they don't, and they continue to have dozens of flags, which Gentoo (due to their build philosophy) dutifully copied and tried to test — an overwhelming task.

shevy-java1 hour ago

> So it's not Gentoo's decision to have so many flags, it's upstream's decision.

That's a weird statement to make though. I would say that it was Gentoo's decision to test for all functionality.

But, even ignoring this for the moment: how does this apply to the linux kernel? Because the config file has TONS of options. Does Gentoo support all of these via use flags? If not, why not? Because that distinction to me would be totally arbitrary.

rmunn36 minutes ago

Would you say they should NOT test the options they're offering the user?

Because Gentoo has basically three options; let me know if you can think of a fourth option I'm missing.

1. Turn every optional feature from upstream into a USE flag, and test them. Which means testing all the 2^N combinations.

2. Turn every optional feature from upstream into a USE flag, but do not test them. Which means users can end up with untested combinations, some of which have proven in the past to be buggy.

3. Stop turning every optional feature from upstream into a USE flag. Which means giving up on Gentoo's distinguishing characteristics for this package.

Okay, I guess there's a fourth option:

4. Stop packaging the Chromium package at all. Which is what they've ended up doing.

msdz2 hours ago

I wonder how the Helium [0] project solves this, since they also work off of an opinionated-ish Chromium base.

[0] https://helium.computer

rmunn1 hour ago

I only glanced at Helium's site, but I suspect from what I saw that they pick a status (enabled/disabled) for all those optional features, meaning they just have to test one (or maybe two or four) combinations of `--enable-foo` / `--enable-bar` flags. Whereas Gentoo tried to allow users to set whatever combination they wanted, and that wasn't working so well when upstream wasn't helping.

octoberfranklin2 hours ago

upstream "do not test their builds with any of their allegedly 'optional' features disabled"

I've noticed this too and it's really annoying. Their CI doesn't even run `gn` for the use-flag permutations, which would take a trivial amount of compute. They could easily compile-but-not-link for every combination of flags in CI too at only a modest compute expenditure. At least that way people who break the #ifdef maze would be forced to fix it.

shevy-java1 hour ago

To be fair though: that's a gentoo fault. They want to be able to be as customizable as possible, which is fine, but if you support all flag-combinations, you are going to either test them all, or forego testing them. It's also a bit awkward that they don't mention this with regards to the linux kernel. Are the use flags that limited to begin with?

shevy-java1 hour ago

I am sorry but I don't really have any respect for developers who help empower the evil AdChromium empire. I understand that people invest their time in making money; I have no problem with that. But I am not going to read a chromium-promo - aka a Google-promo - at the end of the day. That company should have already been split up decades ago.

throwaway20371 hour ago

Honestly, I wonder how much money she gave up? I would need to be "post-economic" before I could do something like that.