Building Chromium at a distro? Here's your copium

Here's the thing: Google does not test whether Chromium still works any further than on the tip of their nose. If they can build it to ship Google Chrome, the rest doesn't matter. This is not what a healthy free software project with such an impact should work like. And yet, well, nothing has changed. If you struggle to run Chromium, you will ultimately struggle to use the Chromium-shaped web. Therefore, it's your own problem.

Distributions have for long separately maintained their own sets of patches. This got changed by Gentoo maintainers, who have started putting the most short-living patches in separate git repositories, which many other distros have similarly started to make use of.

What happened then was, Chromium M120 broke it. This release in particular has brought, at the same time, both V8 not building with GCC, and absl::optional becoming replaced with std::optional, which hits a bug in either LLVM clang++ or GNU libstdc++, not sure, activating if the combination of 2 is used.

The outcome? Most distros, including Alpine (maintained by me), Arch, Gentoo, and Fedora, started building the whole Chromium with the source code of LLVM's libc++ that Chromium is shipped with by default. This came at the cost of unbundling dependencies with C++ interfaces, which we do to deduplicate code and effectively provide security fixes in third-party libraries used in packages.

(Noteworthy: Debian took a different approach and overrode their libstdc++ <optional> header, to a copy of it where triggering asserts got removed.)

Some of you could ask: ok, lnl, but Chromium M120 was released as stable in December 2023. It's April May 2024 now. Hasn't anything changed in the meantime? No, not really, and you're a fool for thinking otherwise. Nothing will really change without fundamental changes of Chromium's purpose. In turn, that won't change under its current ownership of Google. But while this is the status quo, let's cope together.

It's my turn on rolling the stone

I've patched Chromium enough to build with GCC and libstdc++.

Here's your copium, a common set of Chromium patches.

How original is this? To be fair, a lot of it consists of cherry-picks from main, but there's not that few patches I made myself (trying to upstream it as well).

Does it have problems? A lot. It still doesn't work with clang (see above). Also it doesn't work on aarch64 and armv7, for different reasons. No idea if it works anywhere outside x86_64, really.

But it's something. How long is it gonna last? I don't know. But I'll be the Chromium doll for now.