Tools for Chromium development in Gentoo

Yesterday I added an experimental package dev-util/chromium-tools, that contains wrappers for depot_tools, a set of scripts required to fetch and work with Chromium sources.

If you are interested in working on Chromium (the open source web browser project), chromium-tools may be useful for you. Right after installing, gclient, gcl, and drover will be available in your PATH, and auto-updating of those tools will be handled transparently.

There is a git repository for the project, and patches are welcome!

www-client/chromium: gconf no longer required

If you're not using GNOME, but you like www-client/chromium, you no longer have to install gconf, which also brings a few other packages people don't want like gnome-base/orbit (it's a high-performance CORBA ORB, if you'd like to know).

Of course that happens with USE="-gnome", and you also need a bleeding edge version of chromium (>=chromium-9.0.570.0-r1, hard masked). Oh, and just in case you ask: dbus-glib is still needed.

I also landed the patch upstream, so now everyone can benefit from it. Enjoy!

www-client/chromium experimental support for system-v8

I am experimenting with building www-client/chromium with system-provided V8, the super-fast JavaScript engine. If you'd like to try it, emerge >=www-client/chromium-9.0.570.0 with system-v8 USE flag. By the way, this is not just about web browsers. We have patches for other packages too, for example to make mongodb use v8.

The system-v8 USE flag is masked. Here's how to unmask it (remember, it's experimental, may break, etc, etc):

mkdir -p /etc/portage/profile
echo "www-client/chromium -system-v8" >> /etc/portage/profile/package.use.mask

Please report any issues to Gentoo Bugzilla. Thanks!