September 29, 2015

Gentoo's top-notch user community

One of the best parts of Gentoo for me is the community.

For example, I regularly receive email from people who volunteer to help with testing hard masked www-client/chromium ebuilds. FWIW you don't need to email me or the Gentoo Chromium team - just start testing and filing bugs. On the other hand, I do appreciate when people express interest in helping out.

Another example is helping with getting bugs resolved.

Bug #556812 looked rather mysterious - until Guillaume ZITTA found that "build" is a red herring, and in fact the "tracing" module being imported is a different one (from dev-python/tracing as opposed to chromium sources). It was an unfortunate names collision - once found, quite easy to fix.

In bug #553502 Johan Hovold found we need to require postproc USE flag for libvpx to avoid a crash.

See bug #551666 for some Alexey Dobriyan's gdb magic mostly based on a single line segfault report from dmesg...

These are just a few examples.

By the way, the area where we could use more help is arm architecture support. Some specific bugs where help is wanted are #555702#545368#520180, and #483130. Please report whether you can reproduce or not, post emerge --info from your system and the compressed build log in case build fails.

2 comments:

sjn said...

I'm hacking on it too.

I've been maintaining the Linux VAAPI/V4L2 support patch for Chromium in one of my overlays for a long time. I'll be pushing my chromium-55 ebuild onto my github shortly. This is very similar to the one Arch uses, since they're both derived from the same Debian patch. It would be nice to have this available, even if as a build time USE=vaapi option.

Since they've switched over to GN, CC/CXX and CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS are ignored. I've used sed from my ebuild to add extra-cxxflags etc to the linux GN build config. Alternatively, a patch to allow them to be parsed as configure time parameters is possible, but I'm pretty sure upstream isn't interested. They seem to be wanting to make sure every build is using the same flags.

I did also take a stab at getting system-icu working again, didn't get it working, builds take so long...

Unknown said...

sjn, I'm glad to hear about your hacking. :) Please make sure to share your ebuild enhancements on bugs.g.o, in case you didn't already.

For respecting CFLAGS, see https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=587408 and https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/gn-dev/ya5YnChbR7c/UYh5b0RNAAAJ . It turns out upstream can be quite listening to our feedback when done well. :)

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