Callaway: Chromium: Why it isn't in Fedora yet as a proper package

Fedora engineering manager Tom "spot" Callaway looks at Chromium development on his blog. Specifically, he has been building Chromium from source and makes it available for Fedoras 10-12, but hasn't packaged it up officially; in the blog post, he outlines reasons why. "Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought. Rather than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for chromium to use. This is akin to much of the Java methodology, which I can sum up as 'I'd like to use this third-party code, but my application is too special to use it as is, so I covered it with Bedazzler Jewels and Neon Underlighting, then bury my blinged out copy in my application.'. A fair amount of the upstream Chromium devs seem to have Java backgrounds, which may explain this behavior, but it does not excuse it. This behavior should be a last resort, not a first instinct."

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