The Gentoo Linux ebuild for the Chromium package has announced the imminent removal of the package from the repository due to the excessive maintenance effort required. It is mentioned that the maintainer is unable to continue supporting the package at an adequate level after the shortening of the Chrome release cycle. If a volunteer is not found in the coming days to take over the maintenance of Chromium in Gentoo, the package www-client/chromium will cease to be available for installation on October 24.
New corrective versions of Chromium have been appearing every week lately, containing fixes for hundreds of vulnerabilities. In addition to the increased frequency of releases, maintenance is complicated by changes in upstream project toolchains and conflicts stemming from the desire to provide users with the necessary quality while avoiding embedding dependencies into the package whenever possible, alongside the need for prompt publication of updates that fix vulnerabilities. Compiling Chromium takes 15-16 hours on a laptop and about 6 hours on a powerful PC, with the requirement that all build options with different USE flags be verified before the package is published.
Chromium uses a large number of built-in dependencies (e.g., ffmpeg, harfbuzz, zstd), but the addition of Rust and Go dependencies has particularly complicated maintenance. In the case of Rust, the issues are related to the use of experimental features, whose compatibility may be disrupted with new releases, while Go poses challenges because the toolchain requires internet access, which is prohibited for build environments by Gentoo rules. Additionally, there have been noted failures in Google's continuous integration system, which occasionally results in the publication of incomplete code archives.
According to the maintainer, quality support for the package requires a team of at least three people with knowledge of C, C++, Go, JavaScript, and Rust, as well as familiarity with Google's specific tools. One maintainer spends more than 6 hours a week maintaining Chromium, which is nearly an entire workday of their free time, not counting situations where they have to diagnose and fix errors, as well as ensure the build state meets Gentoo's requirements.
The last straw that led to the maintainer deciding to stop supporting the package was the devaluation of their work during discussions about the excessively slow publication of updates to Chromium in Gentoo (currently, Gentoo ships version 151 while the current release is 155). One of the participants in the discussion suggested using a ready-made ebuild script from the third-party Bentoo repository, which is automated. The maintainer explained that simple copying is unacceptable without auditing changes and thoroughly testing all build options with different USE flags, or else there is no guarantee of the package's functionality for all users. In response, they were told that all of this is ridiculous.
In the event of the removal of the package www-client/chromium, users can switch to using the package www-client/google-chrome, which includes Google’s binary builds of Chrome, or utilize third-party Chromium builds in Flatpak format.
Source: opennet.ru
