The Debian community not already maintains a Chromium fork. How much does that cost?
I honestly can’t and wouldn’t judge: Time, Resources, implicit know-how etc. are unknown to me.
The human time needed should grow with the number of patches that need to be applied to the upstream code base, …
jupp
… because some will fail now and then.
Forks are done due to different reasons.
Therefore it depends why to fork.
It could be possible that one feature diverges so much that applying patches isn’t enough.
Especially patches in a debian sense, neither .diff/.patch-patches.
This is what I refer to as “fatness” of the fork. The more patches, the fatter. It should be possible to build, packege and publish a fork with zero patches without human intervention, after the initial automation work.
For a brief period, until something rattles on the build system.
Debian patches are often applied to remove binary blobs due to licensing -
Imagine upstream chooses to include M$ Recall into the render engine.
You would need to apply extraordinary amounts of work. Maybe even maintaining a complete separate implementation.
This would also imply changes on the build systems, which needs to get aligned continiously between both upstreams, now.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious. 😅
With each version you have to very carefully review every commit if you want to maintain compatability with upstream, in order to merge patches into your fork.
When there are 50 devs working on upstream and you need to review every commit to assure requirement X, this alone is a hard path.
If you need to also apply workarounds compatible with future versions of upstream, you need PROFESSIONALS. Luckily these are found in the FOSS community; But they are underpaid and worse: underappreciated.
// plus I could imagine that things like chrome may even not be coming with the full test suite. The test suite of a browser are surely so huge I can’t even comprehend the effort put into it. And then bug tickets… Upstream says: Not in my version. Now the fork has to address these themselves! :)
I honestly can’t and wouldn’t judge: Time, Resources, implicit know-how etc. are unknown to me.
jupp
Forks are done due to different reasons. Therefore it depends why to fork. It could be possible that one feature diverges so much that applying patches isn’t enough. Especially patches in a debian sense, neither .diff/.patch-patches.
For a brief period, until something rattles on the build system. Debian patches are often applied to remove binary blobs due to licensing - Imagine upstream chooses to include M$ Recall into the render engine. You would need to apply extraordinary amounts of work. Maybe even maintaining a complete separate implementation. This would also imply changes on the build systems, which needs to get aligned continiously between both upstreams, now.
With each version you have to very carefully review every commit if you want to maintain compatability with upstream, in order to merge patches into your fork.
When there are 50 devs working on upstream and you need to review every commit to assure requirement X, this alone is a hard path. If you need to also apply workarounds compatible with future versions of upstream, you need PROFESSIONALS. Luckily these are found in the FOSS community; But they are underpaid and worse: underappreciated.
// plus I could imagine that things like chrome may even not be coming with the full test suite. The test suite of a browser are surely so huge I can’t even comprehend the effort put into it. And then bug tickets… Upstream says: Not in my version. Now the fork has to address these themselves! :)