Fedora's missing Chromium updates

Posted Mar 5, 2022 14:55 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: Fedora's missing Chromium updates by mattdm
Parent article: Fedora's missing Chromium updates

1. I must apologize for not being clearer in my original comment. I only wanted to focus on complaints about Chromium maintenance and make it a slight against Martin Stransky's work on Firefox. However, if Firefox is only on Fedora due the heroic work of one person and the vast number of people expecting it to work are not putting any effort in it, then it is a Not In My Back Yard problem. They want it, they know they need it, they know it is required, but putting in the work to make it work would mean having to give up something they prefer so meh let someone else take the work.

2. I don't know what to do with your second paragraph. If it isn't part of the distributions work (and the people who consume said distribution) to help the upstream browsers make it work, then whose is it? The browser companies have already a full hand working on 98% of the desktops they could deploy to by keeping things working Windows and MacOS. Add to that their largest share is on phones which dwarf the amount of work needed for desktops. If it is the consumers of Firefox/Chromium to do so themselves, then why do they even need a distribution?

Fedora's missing Chromium updates

Posted Mar 5, 2022 16:58 UTC (Sat) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

There's a bunch of additional work in Debian and Fedora, for example, in porting Firefox and Chromium to machines and architectures that upstream doesn't really care about - so more than amd64 / x86_64 or arm64 / aarch64. That's good and useful work in that it also sometimes throws up alignment issues or whatever. I'm not sure how much of that work is actually taken in by upstream.

Outwith the distributions doing this - and Debian is broadly the upstream for Ubuntu and all Debian derivatives, Fedora the upstream for most Red Hat-alikes - you wouldn't have the availability to run either of these in places where they run today.
Credit where credit's due, please. One bugbear for Debian, at least, appears to be Rust and Firefox dependencies on Rust which change rapidly and where the necessary toolchains are hard to build. That turns out to be a significant blocker.

The browser as 9/10 of a distro's complexity, - and avoiding things like vendor bundling with NPM and pip dependencies in packages being the other 9/10 - it's also tough to find capable porter boxes and time. The rapidity of change of versions upstream is also the enemy of the good here, I think.

Fedora's missing Chromium updates

Posted Mar 6, 2022 8:01 UTC (Sun) by Tov (subscriber, #61080) [Link]

It seems the underlying issue is perhaps not only lack of man-power, but a too large difference to upstream. The article does not really address whether Google is a receptive upstream or cares too little about desktop Linux.

If all the distros have to invest a lot of work in getting important Linux features integrated (Wayland, VA-API, gcc build etc.) they could perhaps band together to make a common "mid-stream" project, which acts as impedance matching to the un-receptive upstream?