www-client/chromium: Kerberos testers wanted

I changed the way Kerberos works in >=www-client/chromium-15.0.865.0.

If you're interested in testing, please emerge that version with USE="kerberos" and see if the Kerberos support works as intended. It'd also be nice to test with various Kerberos implementations (MIT vs Heimdal).

Even if you're not using Kerberos, if something is broken in that version please also file bugs.

The changes implemented in that version should make it work better with revdep-rebuild (the browser binary now explicitly links with Kerberos libraries instead of using dlopen, and it uses system headers instead of some modified bundled copy; this way breakages should be fixable by revdep-rebuild and not silent).

www-client/chromium: experimental support for ChromeDriver

Due to popular demand, I've added experimental support for ChromeDriver to the latest dev channel release of www-client/chromium. It is controlled by USE="chromedriver".

Please report any issues, even minor ones, with this flag. This should work "out of the box", without any additional downloads or setup. If it doesn't, I'd like to fix it.

By the way, that dev channel release also has optional support for PulseAudio. It is controlled by USE="pulseaudio".

And there are only 4 open bug reports assigned to the Gentoo Chromium Team!

How to file a good bug about FTP-related bugs in Chrome

I have just done a little clean-up of the bugtracker and closed old FTP bugs which don't have enough information to fix them. Of course those bugs can still be re-opened after reporters respond on them.

One of the most important rules for bugs is: please submit information you're asked to submit. If you're unable to follow-up, it's very likely your problem can't be fixed because of missing info.

Generally when filing an FTP-related bug, you should provide:

• version number of Chrome
• URL that causes the problem
• detailed description of the issue (steps to reproduce, expected result, actual result, etc).

Furthermore, if the FTP site is not public, just the URL or description is usually not enough to fix any problem. What's needed is either:

• raw directory listing (if you see anything like that in the error message, it should be obvious what to do), or
• Wireshark/other sniffer's dump of network traffic.

If you're unable to provide that info, but are able to identify the name of the FTP server software serving the site, there is still a chance that the problem can be reproduced by installing that FTP software on developer's machine.

Finally, when submitting the raw directory listing, please don't just copy-paste it, because that results in implicit character set conversions. Use the browser's "Save As" command to save the raw listing to disk, and then attach that file to your bug report.

www-client/chromium-14.0.835.15 dev channel release

Last dev channel release of www-client/chromium was really non-trivial to package. Here are the bugs that I had to fix:

• bug #375759 by Mathieu Zhang
• bug #375827 by fkhp
• bug #376301 by Julien Sanchez
• bug #376499 and bug #376501 by Mike Gilbert
• NaCl didn't work (missing IRT in the tarballs)
• system libvpx didn't work, had to switch back to bundled one
• WebRTC requires PulseAudio to compile

Now before you start worrying about PulseAudio (which I know many people don't want on their systems), let me remind you that this is still a hard masked ebuild, and I'll ensure that our dependency on PulseAudio becomes optional. I'm working closely with the upstream to make that possible, so please stay tuned. Feel free to add yourself to the CC list of bug #377847.

Enjoy your updates!

More Manifest signing tips and stats

If you're signing Manifests and wonder how to use a stronger hash than SHA-1, here's a nice ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf snippet:


enable-dsa2
personal-digest-preferences SHA512,SHA256,SHA1

This is a modified version of Justin's snippet.

By the way, since my last signing-related post in March, the number of signed Manifests has increased and now about 56% of Manifests are signed. Here are commands I've used to count the total number of Manifests and signed ones:

find /usr/portage -maxdepth 3 -name Manifest | wc -l
find /usr/portage -maxdepth 3 -name Manifest -exec grep -l 'BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE' {} + | wc -l

www-client/chromium Gentoo bugs review and how you can help

Let me start with a general tip: if you're using Gentoo and hit a bug, please make sure there is a bug filed on Gentoo Bugzilla. Feel free to also report bugs upstream (this is great; remember to paste the link to the upstream bug in the Gentoo bug), but having a bug on the Gentoo side allows us to work around or at least be aware of issues for example when stabilizing new versions.

For example, see bug #371931: the upstream issue 78644 has been reported in April, but I only became aware of it late June, about 2 months of delay! Note that upstream generally prioritizes fixes that affect Google Chrome users, and not distro users. The bug does not affect Google Chrome, because it uses bundled ffmpeg. Upstream still wants to fix it (at some point they'll have to update ffmpeg), but it's just not a priority.

Okay, so let's review remaining bugs. If you want to help, this is a good opportunity.

bug #348841 - www-client/chromium: webgl not working: does http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/ work for you? Please post both success and failure reports, including emerge --info, www-client/chromium version and USE flags, media-libs/mesa version and USE flags. We may be able to correlate the reports and see what triggers problems.

bug #350250 - www-client/chromium-9.0.597.19 uses bundled protobuf: we still use bundled protobuf, and I'm afraid the version bundled with chromium may be patched in an incompatible way; I'll take a more detailed look when I find some time, but if you're interested in tinkering with the browser internals, it may be an interesting project; feel free to share your findings on that bug

bug #355181, bug #365841: we have some build issues with libpng-1.5; if you'd like to help fix them, please test with www-client/chromium-9999 and see if there are some not yet reported compile errors; if in doubt, just file a new bug; if you find upstream bugs or patches about this, please also report them

bug #361461 - www-client/chromium-11.0.696.25: fails to build with gcc 4.6; similar to the above: if you want to test, please use chromium-9999 and report any not yet reported issues, ideally both on the Gentoo and upstream side

bug #365187 - =www-client/chromium-11.0.696.57 and other version does not respect CFLAGS; this is a minor issue but it would be nice to fix it; if you're interested in modifying the upstream's custom build system, patches are welcome

bug #366695 - www-plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.3-r1 causes www-client/chromium to hang; this is sad - it seems many people would like to use gecko-mediaplayer, but we keep hitting various issues with it and Chromium; I'm not sure what's going on, so comments are welcome

bug #372495 - www-client/chromium fails to build with glibc-2.14 (tcmalloc); I think I'll just backport the upstream patch after some testing

That's it! Short bug queues are good for everyone, if you're interested feel free to read my earlier post.

net-print/foo2zjs: removed broken versions

Earlier this year I added a foo2zjs ebuild that works. However, the older, broken versions were still in the tree, frustrating people. Today I removed those ancient versions (from 2008), and closed a lot of bugs: bug #321967, bug #323087, bug #340215, bug #353302, bug #367339.

If you encounter some problems with the 99999999 ebuild, please file a bug and CC me (phajdan.jr).

If you wonder how to emerge the ebuild now (it has no KEYWORDS), just do the following:

# echo "=net-print/foo2zjs-99999999 **" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge -av net-print/foo2zjs

I hope you like it!