Would you say they should NOT test the options they're offering the user?

Because Gentoo has basically three options; let me know if you can think of a fourth option I'm missing.

1. Turn every optional feature from upstream into a USE flag, and test them. Which means testing all the 2^N combinations.

2. Turn every optional feature from upstream into a USE flag, but do not test them. Which means users can end up with untested combinations, some of which have proven in the past to be buggy.

3. Stop turning every optional feature from upstream into a USE flag. Which means giving up on Gentoo's distinguishing characteristics for this package.

Okay, I guess there's a fourth option:

4. Stop packaging the Chromium package at all. Which is what they've ended up doing.

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debugnik 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can tell you what Gentoo shouldn't do: blame upstream for having assigned themselves the mission to support and test 2^N combinations of options for which they don't get to curate N.

They're free to limit which options they offer, they're free to limit which combinations they support, and they're free to fork or drop the software they offer if they insist on keeping the 2^N purity (which they eventually did). But that's Gentoo's mission, not upstream's. Upstream is just giving them software for free on an as-is basis.

	▲	rmunn 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Upstream is just giving them software for free on an as-is basis. While the "we're entitled to bugfixes" attitude is definitely annoying for software maintainers to deal with, and you (as the end user) aren't entitled to anything from 99% of open-source projects... this is Chromium we're talking about. The browser engine that powers 75-95% of all Web browsing (it's very hard to pin down actual numbers, but it's huge). It is not too much to ask that the Chromium maintainers either 1) test all the combinations of optional flags they have, or 2) declare that some of those optional flags are no longer optional. In other words, to act like professionals. (I don't use Chromium myself — switched to Firefox years ago because I tend to open a lot of tabs, which make Chromium seem to just gobble up RAM, and Firefox appears a little better at RAM management, or at least it did at the time I switched (haven't checked recently). So this isn't "the Chromium team owes me something", this is shaking my head in disappointment at what the Gentoo maintainers report that Chromium team is doing, or rather not doing. As I said, there are some projects — the Linux kernel is one, and Chromium is another — that are so widely used that a certain level of professionalism should be expected of their maintainers. I agree that that attitude of entitlement is not deserved in about 99% of open-source projects. But Chromium is part of the 1% exception, IMHO).

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uniq7 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Which option was chosen for the Linux kernel?

	▲	csande17 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Traditionally, the Gentoo package manager didn't actually compile the Linux kernel at all. Instead it just extracted the source code to a folder on your hard drive and you were supposed to go configure, build, and install it yourself. Gentoo Wiki pages would list out the options you had to go set in the `make menuconfig` menu to get specific software to work. These days there is a package that builds the kernel for you, but it relies on the "savedconfig" system to just save/load the entire kernel config file instead of using USE flags. So you still have to root around in the config menu yourself to change things. In my experience Linux is very good at correctly declaring dependencies between options, and still working with options disabled, so this isn't as much of a problem as it seems to be for Chromium.