On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 6:54 AM, Alexis Ballier <aball...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> On Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:10:12 -0800 >> ""Paweł Hajdan, Jr."" <phajdan...@gentoo.org> wrote: >>> >>> What when chromium upstream uses code more recent than latest ffmpeg >>> release and it doesn't compile against latest release? >> >> Blame them, it's stupid to break support for the latest release. >> Usually, it's quite trivial to maintain compatibility and you should >> probably lobby upstream to get this as a rule, it'd make life simpler >> for everyone. Or just patch releases not to use too bleeding-edge code >> (see mplayer for example). > > While I agree in principle, that is much easier said than done. I > think upstream is more likely to consider the concept of a linux > distro broken than their code. > > The unpacked chromium distfile is 1.1G, of which 694M is third party > source-code. The chromium team has done an excellent job of disabling > much of that, but the upstream attitude clearly is to cherry-pick > their dependencies. This is pretty typical for Google projects from > what I've seen - ChromeOS basically is a fork of Gentoo with many > packages being fairly dated, and Android does just about everything > its own way, typically releasing third-party code into production > before any upstream packages have access to it.
Google generally prefers agility. Particularly when machines have gobs of memory (so bundling is not as big of a deal as it was previously) and they can staff security fixes for all their bundled libs. This is quite a pervasive attitude there. Coming from a distribution background it can be weird to see the different priorities (and terrible systems that build the packages that work on $DISTRO, ew.) -A > > Of course, we should encourage upstream to improve its practices. I > just wouldn't count on it, so I think we need to give the chromium > team discretion on just how much patching they think they can handle. > They're obviously pretty good at it already. > > Rich >
