17 Apr 09 Chromium Browser FAQ – Arch

I have been maintaining the Chromium Browser PKGBUILD in Arch Linux for some time now and I thought it would be helpful to publish a FAQ. The popularity of this PKGBUILD on AUR has grown very fast, and with that there have been a lot of questions regarding its build, architecture support and upstream compatibility. I will try to address those questions below.

note: Answers attributed to “Fabien Tassin” are based on an email conversation I had with the Ubuntu package maintainer.

1. Can you tell me what (if any) difference your builds have from these [upstream] builds?

I don’t know their exact build flags but it should not be very different. I have the infrastructure to use system libs and strip most of the 3rd party dependencies in my packaging branch but so far, i’m still very close to upstream. – Fabien Tassin

2) Can you tell me where you are getting the source daily to do your builds?

From upstream svn. See my get-orig-source rule in debian/rules. – Fabien Tassin

3) Why are you using a binary .deb instead of compiling from upstream source?

Compiling chromium-browser by downloading code from svn would download 2.5GB for a full snapshot. This is likely bandwidth and storage prohibitive for many users.

4) Why aren’t there any x86_64 native builds? Why do we have to run it in 32bit compat mode?

Upstream has no native 64bit support to start with. Their js engine (v8) and graphic lib (skia) are not 64bit ready. – Fabien Tassin