chromium-bin

[nokilli]

I've spent a few hours looking at what it would take to resurrect www-client/chromium-bin. I say resurrect because it appears this was once available in the tree, but no more.

There is of course www-client/chromium and which is of course brilliant. It is an ebuild that requires some combination of a fairly beefy computer and a good deal of time however. Given that the browser is perhaps that application on a system that is most in need of being up-to-date, a faster way of updating would be nice, i.e., a binary build.

The Chromium devs make available snapshots. For instance, at the time of this post, the most recent snapshot of Chromium for amd64 can be found here. I've downloaded and installed this binary and it works! This URL was reached by navigating through this page, which is basically a listing of every build they've ever done for that architecture and there's a text file that tells you which is the most recent.

The wikipedia page for Chromium however (funky URL won't let me use url tag, sorry) talks about another page here. This page is called Index of chromium-browser-continuous/Linux_x64/ whereas the one I downloaded from is called Index of chromium-browser-snapshots/Linux_x64/. According to the wikipedia page, there is one process which generates builds and puts them in the snapshots directory, and then another process which tests those builds and if/when they pass, they get put into the continuous directory. Alas, that process no longer appears to be functioning. The binary I downloaded from snapshots is dated 2018-02-06, whereas the most recent binary available via continuous is dated 2016-03-18.

So I guess my question is, if it's that easy to fetch a chromium binary, why did Gentoo give up chromium-bin? Is it because these binaries are no longer being tested? I'm not Mr. Bash-guy but it seems to me that the pointy end of the ebuild here is probably a one-liner.

Or did Gentoo give it up because there's www-client/chrome? I've been using Chrome and I noticed that they do this really sad thing with cookie management. If you go Settings->Advanced->Privacy and Security->Content Settings->Cookies->See all cookies and site data, you'll see a list of your cookies. If yours is like mine, you've got a list of maybe several hundred cookies in there. Scroll down and delete one. Notice how the cookie pane resets to the top when you do? So the user who wants to delete many cookies is made to engage in this laborious rote of scrolling down, finding the cookie, delete; scrolling down, finding the cookie, delete; etc. Clearly the correct UI here is to allow either the cookies to be selected for deletion then deleted en masse or to be deleted one after the other without adjusting the containing pane. And just as clearly, the powers that be understand this. Visit the Chrome forums and you can see that many users have been complaining about this practice, to no avail. One user commented that she was going to start using Chromium instead of Chrome.

I thought that was a good idea. However, the version of Chromium I just installed engages in the very same practice. I understand why Chrome is doing this, Google is an ad company and their mantra of "don't be evil" was misdirection. But Chromium I thought was open source. A user not being given foremost consideration in an open source project is something I haven't encountered before.

(well, except for x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers, of course.)

So my takeaway is that Gentoo just decided fuck it, we'll go with Chrome. And any user who insists on Chromium can build from source or download the binary manually using https://storage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-snapshots/ which I guess works for me since my enthusiasm for making the ebuild happen is no longer what it was.

However there is the Brave web browser, and I don't see any Gentoo support for that at this time. So failing convincing feedback re: the above that's what I'm going to start looking at now cause that I believe will be the future.
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Today is the first day of the rest of your Gentoo installation.

[saboya]

So, to sum it up:

1 - You have no idea why the Gentoo team gave up on chromium-bin.
2 - You then assume the Gentoo team decided "fuck it, if you want it, compile it",
3 - You are not willing to put the effort into making the ebuild happen, even though you are clearly interested in the existence of this ebuild, putting the time into writing several paragraphs about it.

So, why should the devs bother, if the people that are interested in the ebuild also don't want to put in the effort?

[nokilli]

[Ant P.]

The primary reason there isn't an ebuild for this is the upstream-provided binaries are unstable snapshots, none of them are sanely versioned and they disappear days later without warning (Chrome itself also suffers the latter problem). At best you'd be getting a chromium-bin-9999.ebuild that downloads in an ad-hoc way, and Gentoo probably doesn't want to be in the business of providing random unsigned binaries for something as security-critical as a browser.

And unlike something like libreoffice-bin, chromium issues new security releases multiple times a week. Providing distro-built -bin packages with all the required QA would be impossible.

The farcical cookie handling in google's browser was what sent me back to firefox, btw. Even if you set the default to clear on exit, Google sites have a privileged backdoor to store persistent tracking data - lots of it.

[nokilli]

I was happy with Firefox until they dropped support for ALSA and compelled use of pulseaudio. Making that kind of change on my system would be akin to gender-reassignment surgery, and this boy wants to stay a boy.

Thank you for explaining the likely Gentoo perspective on this. I didn't think about versioning or signing. That makes total sense.

I'm assuming that the reason I can just download these binaries and see them work is because all of the heavy lifting with dependencies has been performed by my earlier emerge of Chrome. I can see continuing to use Chrome but I think I'll have to learn the discipline to use separate instances under separate accounts, e.g., one for Google sites only (I have a gmail account for instance), one for development, one for play, etc.

I definitely need Chrome for development as I picked a fine time to get into Angular/TypeScript/JavaScript, and the Chrome developer tools are very good to the point of being indispensable.

I like the future that Brave suggests but I'm not going to pretend I understand fully how this works in the real world. I'm used to having a browser I can just mostly trust and that mostly lets me do what I want to do without having to think about the consequences of a click all of the time.

Basically I want 2004 back.
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Today is the first day of the rest of your Gentoo installation.

[Zucca]

[Hu]

[Juippisi]

[nokilli]

[figueroa]

A chromium-bin would be greatly appreciated.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[Elleni]

Bit OT but maybe this helps reducing build times significantly.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1074724-highlight-chromium.html

[figueroa]

On second thought, Vivaldi seems great. Goodbye Chromium.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[figueroa]

Resurrecting this zombie just to note that www-client/chromium-bin now exists (again). I emerged it. It seems pretty clean. I don't have any of the intervening history and can't find anything in these forums.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[Zucca]

This sure is of great help for those who can't use another computer to build chromium.
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..: Zucca :..