Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package

Commenters focused on why maintaining Gentoo's Chromium has become untenable, sharing painful compile-from-source stories. Several people (williebeek, plqbfbv, plant-ian) described Chromium as unusually demanding: ninja with exact versions, Clang instead of GCC, PGO/LTO and jumbo-build complications, thousands of build steps and long link times, and frequent toolchain or header churn that defeats ccache. Ex-LFS and ex-Gentoo voices (kleiba2, nly) contrasted the ideal of tailored, source-built systems with the reality of long build times, ABI breakage, and the tradeoffs between bundled and system libraries; one noted that ChromeOS itself uses Gentoo under the hood (Almondsetat). A few reminisced fondly about Gentoo’s flexibility but conceded it’s high-maintenance.

Opinion split over blame and priorities. Some commenters blamed Google’s monorepo and upstream choices for vendorizing and patching libraries, saying that made distro packaging harder (account42, yyaakkqq), while others defended Chromium’s approach as a pragmatic response to scale, cross-platform needs and security/sandboxing requirements that favor specific toolchains and remote builds (delta_p_delta_x, rcxdude). Several argued for respecting volunteer maintainers and not demanding unpaid “fixes” (thev00d00, ethin). Meanwhile daily Gentoo users defended the distribution for extreme customization and patchability (M95D, pvdebbe).