Chromium and distributions

Google (and Pawel specifically) deserve some credit for the improvements made to the Chromium codebase since I wrote that post in 2009. Certainly, it is in a far better state than it was when I first tried to dig into it. However, there are several notable issues plaguing the Chromium codebase still:

* Compilers: To build a fully functional Chromium, you need three working compiler toolchains (one for NaCL, one for pNaCL, and a specific revision of llvm for the rest of the chromium code). Google provides pre-built versions of these compilers, but for obvious reasons, that isn't useful for any distributions that require everything to be built from source (most of them). They've made good progress in documenting how to build these toolchains (two of which are forked revisions, one is ... just a specific point in time checkout of llvm), but not a lot of visible progress in pushing their changes into the respective upstream compilers so that it is not necessary to carry these Chromium only compilers.

* Configuration - Chromium continues to lack any real "configure" step in the build process. Gyp assumes that the builder (human or script) knows exactly what options to manually pass. Every other project even remotely approaching the level of complexity of Chromium has a "./configure" step (insert your favorite tooling here) that detects available and usable system libraries and resources, then sets up the build to use them.

* Bundling of Google bits - It continues to be the case that the code maintained by Google is bundled inside Chromium, then forked for Chromium, and those changes don't make it back to the original Google upstream home. Examples include skia and libjingle.

* Contributor Agreement - Since Pawel brought this up, while he is correct that the Google Contributor Agreement is not a copyright assignment, it does grant Google the right to relicense any contributed changes under a non-free license. This is especially noteworthy given that Google uses the Chromium sources to make a non-free browser (Chrome). I have chosen not to agree to those terms, because I have no interest in helping Google (or anyone) make a better non-free browser (or potentially close the Chromium source code base in the future).