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.

> 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).