[Fedora-packaging] Is it time to allow Chromium in Fedora?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 12 August 2015 at 12:40, Gerald B. Cox <gbcox at bzb.us> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I think you and many others are asking the wrong questions or have and
>> ignored the answers. Why are not other browsers available? is not the
>> question but why are people not working on other browsers? Who are the
>> people who are working on getting Chromium packaged? Who are the
>> people inside of Fedora who are willing and able to work on the
>> package to deal with various bugs?
>
>
> No, that's not the point.  The point is to gauge interest within the
> community.  You can
> get Chromium from Russian Fedora and from Tom's copr.  If there is
> sufficient interest
> I'm sure people will step forward to assist.  I definitely would.  The
> amount of effort
> to proceed through the FPC process is not trivial.  If people aren't
> interested, then I
> personally wouldn't want to go through the effort.
>

And that is probably be why Chromium has never been added. It takes a
person or people with the willpower to get through the process and
realize they may fail doing it.. because long term packages require
that kind of willpower to keep up with. We have a ton of packages that
get orphaned every year because people get tired of working on bugs,
on packaging issues, and other things. Getting something into Fedora
on the level of Chromium is not going to be a walk in the park. Tom
usually has to spend days getting the package back together whenever
Chromium decides to change their buildsystem, add in a new bundled
dep, change a bundled dep to their fork of it, etc etc. And if he has
to go on a work conference or wants to spend time with his family..
all he gets is "Why haven't you updated Chromium today?" emails.

How important packages get added is that someone has done the work on
getting the package into shape, worked on it for a while, and
hopefully has gotten a team of people together who work together on
keeping the ball rolling. It may not ever actually get included, but
the work is being done whether or not it does. If people aren't
willing to do that much before getting the 'package' ready.. then you
can not actually gauge actual interest just "free pizza" interest.



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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.