Can your distro compile Chromium?

Chromium is moving towards using C++11. Even more, it's going to require either gcc-4.8 or clang.

Distros like Ubuntu, Mageia, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, CentOS, and Slackware are already using gcc-4.8 or later is their latest stable release.

On the other hand, Debian Wheezy (7.0) has gcc-4.7.2. Gentoo is using gcc-4.7.3 in stable.

I started a thread on gentoo-dev, gcc-4.8 may be needed in stable for www-client/chromium-38.x. There is a tracker for gcc-4.8 stabilization, bug #516152. There is also gcc-4.8 porting tracker, bug #461954.

Please consider testing gcc-4.8 on your stable Gentoo system, and file bugs for any package that fails to compile or needs to have a newer version stabilized to work with new gcc. I have recompiled all packages, the kernel, and GRUB without problems.

The title of this post is deliberately a bit similar to my earlier post Is your distro fast enough for Chromium? This browser project is pushing a lot towards shorter release cycles and latest software. I consider that a good thing. Now we just need to keep up with the updates, and any help is welcome.

Recovering from removed libgcc_s.so.1 (and missing busybox)

I was experimenting in my arm chroot, and after a gcc upgrade and emerge --depclean --ask that removed the old gcc I got the following error:

# ls -l

ls: error while loading shared libraries: libgcc_s.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Fortunately the newer working gcc was present, so the steps to make things work again were:

# LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/lib/gcc/armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi/4.8.2/" gcc-config -l

 * gcc-config: Active gcc profile is invalid!

 [1] armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi-4.8.2

# LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/lib/gcc/armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi/4.8.2/" gcc-config 1 

 * Switching native-compiler to armv7a-hardfloat-linux-gnueabi-4.8.2 ...

Actually my first thought was using busybox. The unexpected breakage during a routine gcc upgrade made me do some research in case I can't rely on /bin/busybox being present and working.

I highly recommend the following links for further reading:
http://lambdaops.com/rm-rf-remains
http://eusebeia.dyndns.org/bashcp
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/27is0x/rm_rf_remains/ci199bk

perl-cleaner slot conflict when upgrading perl (5.16 -> 5.18)

If you tried upgrading from stable amd64 to ~amd64 or otherwise done a big update of perl, you probably hit this weird perl-cleaner slot conflict:

# perl-cleaner --all
!!! Multiple package instances within a single package slot have been pulled
!!! into the dependency graph, resulting in a slot conflict:

dev-lang/perl:0

  (dev-lang/perl-5.18.2:0/5.18::gentoo, installed) pulled in by
    =dev-lang/perl-5.18* required by (virtual/perl-IO-1.280.0:0/0::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge)
    ^              ^^^^^                                                                                                                                  
    dev-lang/perl:0/5.18=[-build(-)] required by (perl-core/version-0.990.800:0/0::gentoo, installed)
                 ^^^^^^^^                                                                                                              
    (and 7 more with the same problems)

  (dev-lang/perl-5.16.3:0/5.16::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) pulled in by
    =dev-lang/perl-5.16* required by (virtual/perl-Package-Constants-0.20.0-r3:0/0::gentoo, installed)
    ^              ^^^^^                                                                                                                                  
    (and 6 more with the same problem)

This is bug #506616, and the solution is to run the following command:

perl-cleaner --all -- --backtrack=30

System update report (last update a year ago)

I have some systems that I update more rarely than the others. Of course I highly recommend keeping up to date, especially for the security fixes. I've also written similar update reports in the past. You may want to read them and compare the experience:

Another 5-month update (December 2011)
Another report from rarely updated system (September 2012)