The Chromium ebuild on Gentoo Linux announced that the package will soon be removed from the repository due to too much maintenance effort. It is mentioned that the maintainer is unable to continue to maintain the package as expected after Chrome’s release cycle is shortened. If there is no volunteer willing to take over Chromium maintenance on Gentoo within the next few days, www-client/chromium will no longer be available for installation on October 24th.
New Chromium revisions lately appears every week and contains fixes for hundreds of vulnerabilities. In addition to the increasing frequency of releases, maintenance is complicated by changes in the tools of upstream projects and conflicts associated, on the one hand, with the desire to provide users with the required quality, avoiding, if possible, embedding dependencies in the package, and, on the other hand, with the need to promptly publish updates that correct vulnerabilities. Compiling Chromium takes 15-16 hours on a laptop and about 6 hours on a powerful PC, despite the fact that before publishing the package you need to check all build options with different USE flags.
Chromium uses a large number of built-in dependencies (e.g. ffmpeg, harfbuzz, zstd), but the addition of Rust and Go dependencies made it particularly difficult to maintain. In the case of Rust, the problems are associated with the use of experimental features, compatibility with which may be broken with new releases, and Go with the fact that the toolkit requires network access, which is prohibited for build environments by Gentoo rules. In addition, there have been glitches in Google’s continuous integration system, which at times lead to the publication of incomplete code archives.
According to the maintainer, high-quality support for the package requires a team of at least three people with knowledge of the languages C, C++, Go, JavaScript and Rust, as well as familiar with specific Google tools. One maintainer spends more than 6 hours a week maintaining Chromium, i.e. almost a full workday of his free time, and that’s not counting the situations in which he has to diagnose and fix bugs, as well as bring the build state to conform to Gentoo requirements.
The last straw, after which the maintainer decided to stop maintaining the package, was the depreciation of his work in discussion the too slow publication of Chromium updates in Gentoo (in Gentoo version 151 is currently being shipped, with the current release being 155). One of the discussion participants suggested using a ready-made ebuild script from a third-party repository Bentoo, the maintenance of which is automated. The maintainer clarified