Distros and QtWebEngine

[Raymond Wooninck]

On Monday, April 20, 2015 01:28:59 PM Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer 
wrote:

(I am talking with my openSUSE packager hat on as I am the Chromium packager 
and am part of the community team that packages KDE/Qt)

> It embeds quite a lot of 3rd party stuff which we distros don't accept (in
> different grades depending on the distro) as we require to build using the
> system versions. Fedora's Rex Dieter tells me that's actually why chromium
> is not available for them.

Isn't this the real main issue with the new QtWebEngine and Chromium itself ?? 
In the past I have been trying to get Chromium to build using system version 
of the 3rd party stuff, but this only worked out for some of them. Google 
didn't just included the 3rd party stuff, but also altered it to their needs 
and some things never got upstreamed.

From what I understood the main reason for Fedora not to provide Chromium is 
the inclusion of the ffmpeg sources. Fedora is not allowed to provide binaries 
nor sources that contain stuff that could have legal implications. This was 
also initially openSUSE's main concern, however the legal department of SUSE 
accepted having the sourcecode on our BuildSercie, as long as we did not build 
any codecs from it that could cause these legal issues. 

This situation will not likely change as that there are old bug reports 
regarding this situation and they were never resolved. 

We followed the same approach for QtWebEngine and at the moment we are 
providing both to our users. 

> Moreover we can't build debugging symbols on most archs due to the enormous
> amount of RAM+swap it involves in the linking process (more than 8GB last
> time I checked). This is at least the same as QtWebKit, but seems to be
> getting worse.

Switching to the gold linker would help quite a lot here. At least I am able 
to build Chromium on armv7l with it :)

Regards

Raymond