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List:       debian-devel
Subject:    ungoogled-chromium? [was: Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)]
From:       Tomas Pospisek <tpo2 () sourcepole ! ch>
Date:       2021-12-07 18:43:10
Message-ID: f636ab27-805c-dae5-95da-d82a42f65a2f () sourcepole ! ch
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On 06.12.21 20:43, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 05, 2021 at 07:58:17PM +0300, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> > > > So what's happening with chromium in both sid and stable? I saw on d-release \
> > > > that it was removed from testing (#998676 and #998732), with a  discussion \
> > > > about ending security support for it in stable.
> > > 
> > > The problem really is lack of maintenance. In my opinion, chromium deserves an \
> > > active *team* to support it in Debian.  <...>  The security team doesn't have \
> > > the bandwidth to do it themselves, they need a team to help them.
> > 
> > Sorry for a silly question, but whatʼs so wrong with the build done by \
> > linuxmint.com [1], so Debian needs a whole team to duplicate their effort?  Itʼs \
> > for Debian 10 (i. e. oldstable) as of now, but works fine at Sid in my (limited) \
> > experience. 
> 
> Well, you can start with the fact that the Mint chromium source packages
> don't even include the chromium source, let alone the sources for all
> the other things they build (NodeJS, and more).
> 
> The biggest difficulty, as far as I can tell from my look at Chromium
> from several months ago, is that our patch set [1] needs a lot of
> attention with every chromium release.  Mint doesn't apply any patches
> at all to the source, at least none of any real complexity.
> 
> One lesson we may take from Mint, though, is that it's not worth trying
> to patch Chromium as much as we'd like.  Anything that we can do to
> simplify the Chromium packaging will help us keep the package
> up-to-date, which in turn will help us keep our users safer.  In my
> opinion, we should be pretty aggressive about dropping as many of the
> Chromium patches as possible, even if that means we link against
> bundled/vendored dependencies.
> 
> Legal/licensing considerations are still important and I don't know if
> we actually *can* ship builds based on the bundled stuff.  But based on
> the number of patches we have to disable various things [2] or build
> against system dependencies [3], I can't help but think we'd have an
> easier time keeping this package fresh if we could drop some of those.
> 
> noah
> 
> 1. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/blob/master/debian/patches/series
>  2. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/tree/master/debian/patches/disable
>  3. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/tree/master/debian/patches/system
> 

I'd also like to point out, that the ungoogled-chromium project has some 
overlap in goals with Debian and it'd possibly be interessing to join 
forces:

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-debian

(I have been running an ungoogled-chromium for a while (ca. a year 
ago?), however at that time their chrome wasn't extremely stable so I 
gave up again. Does anybody have experience using it recently?)
*t


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