Overreactions?

Posted Jan 25, 2021 18:56 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: Overreactions? by rfunk
Parent article: The endless browser wars

I don't think of it as an over-reaction. This is not an easy package to build. It requires a LOT of work every release to just to compile, figure out what was changed, and what is needed to make it work this time with the rules of the operating system. What packages do you need to include this time, what items are bundled in and what is the license review for each one. Then it is getting it to compile on whatever architectures your operating system supports and see the 8 hour build time crash at 7 hours 50 minutes for some new reason. Then finding out that as it is recommended to be built that it doesn't actually render text for some reason but if you do the builds differnetly it does.

Then you are the person who gets every 'bug' report about bookmarks, etc not working. People see bugzilla or your email address as tech-support and use it wanting to know why they can't connect to google for this that or the other.

All in all, this is not a package that endears itself to the packagers or the operating system. Its whole goal is to say 'see we have the source code and you can make it do something.. but you probably don't want to do that and will use our compiled one instead.'

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 25, 2021 19:09 UTC (Mon) by andy_shev (subscriber, #75870) [Link] (4 responses)

ccache will help to save time for test builds until you be sure it's okay to go.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 25, 2021 21:08 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

I worked on LibreOffice back when it was just a set of patches on the original OpenOffice called "ooo-build". Yes, ccache helps, but it's the difference between an 8-hour build and a 3-hour build. It's still painful when something fails at the 2:45 mark.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 27, 2021 8:56 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

That looks like a broken build system. Any builder worth its name should be designed to pick up where it stopped and simply continue.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 27, 2021 17:08 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

In local development, sure. But CI and (official) package builds are almost always done from-scratch.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 25, 2021 23:46 UTC (Mon) by himi (subscriber, #340) [Link]

I'm pretty sure that anyone building distro packages is well aware of ccache (as well as all the associated things like distcc) - it's been a core component of large build systems for literally decades.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 25, 2021 21:07 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (3 responses)

> Then it is getting it to compile on whatever architectures your operating system supports

Packages like Chromium seem like a case study in "packages don't need to support architectures that have no users of *that specific package*".

Even Debian only builds Chromium for x86 and ARM.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 25, 2021 21:14 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

Getting it to compile on just x86_64 and aarch64 can be a nightmare of arch specific problems (yes that is supposed to be where chrome is native.. hahahahaha). I wasn't even thinking of going to the x86_32 and arm32 arches as required.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 25, 2021 22:21 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

Debian also builds Chromium for 32-bit x86 and 32-bit ARM, but I suspect that removing the former wouldn't impact anyone, and the latter would impact relatively few people.

Overreactions?

Posted Feb 17, 2021 10:16 UTC (Wed) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

I still have a i386 Netbook running Debian that I sometimes use for debugging my network. I wouldn't cry too much if Chromium went away as I mostly use Firefox but I do use occasionally Chromium to double-check if problems are browser-related or not.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 26, 2021 10:56 UTC (Tue) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (3 responses)

At one point Opera contributed to Chromium a jumbo build option that reduced the build time from 8 hours to 1 and half roughly. Then a year ago Google removed those patches from Chromium tree as Google does not need them as they compile with their distributed server farm. But those patches are still maintained outside Chromium.

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 28, 2021 2:40 UTC (Thu) by fulke (guest, #140430) [Link] (1 responses)

Interesting. Could you post any references?

Overreactions?

Posted Jan 28, 2021 12:54 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

On utility of jumbo builds in Chromium - https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/big-project-...

Google announcing removal of jumbo support - https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/ch... . According to my colleague who knows people on Chromium team the primary driver for the removal was a Google manager who got very upset after trying to figure out why his patch broke a build. Eventually he figured out it was due to the jumbo feature that added some small and very easy to follow restrictions on C++ code, but if one does not know about them, it can take some time to figure things out.

For getting jumbo to work with Chromium again - https://twitter.com/pati_gallardo/status/1352587508375293952

Overreactions?

Posted Feb 5, 2021 20:00 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Those patches are basically keeping KDE afloat in Gentoo right now.

It turns out making people spend 8-16 hours a day every 6 weeks compiling a half-gigabyte rendering engine that's often only used for frivolous HTML approximations of native widgets gets tiresome fast. Maybe abandoning QtWebkit was a bad idea.