Faster Chrome releases (round two) | Hacker News Reader

Faster Chrome releases (round two)

developer.chrome.com

23 pointsdcgudeman15 comments

I maintain a Chromium fork, always painful due to how long this shit takes to compile... on my tiny box it takes the whole day.. this will add more load to my server and i already hate that, I might take this opportunity to switch to a personal fork of Firefox

The amount of bloat software developers spit at our face is insane, what a waste

I get annoyed by every Chrome release breaking WebDriver/ChromeDriver. Firefox's equivalent seems pretty stable on the other hand.

> on my tiny box it takes the whole day

Think of the resources wasted. It'd be cool if there was a publically trustable technology where source shipped with like a known computable hash combination of triplet platform, flags, etc. and then the artifacts could be pulled and only recompiled if needed?

What's the point of maintaining personal fork of browser? Are you adding some feature to it, or auditing every commit since last release for security/privacy purpose? If former, I doubt you can switch from Chrome to Firefox as easily as the way you chosen the words. If latter, I doubt any person in this planet have the expertise or bandwidth to do so due the complexity and size of the code base, not to mention you already be annoying by just building it.

What modifications do you have in your personal Chromium fork? I’ve been thinking about making a custom Firefox build that disables some of the stupid stuff they’ve added, but haven’t gotten around to actually doing it yet.

Mostly font rendering and no-google stuff

Patch (font):

https://www.oetec.com/pastebin/lined/bN4DXmvV

Before:

https://www.oetec.com/pastebin/plain/bN4DzFCr

https://www.oetec.com/pastebin/plain/bN4Dprys

https://www.oetec.com/pastebin/plain/bN4D6T4W

After:

https://www.oetec.com/pastebin/plain/bN4D6Mai

https://www.oetec.com/pastebin/plain/bN4DuwFK

https://www.oetec.com/pastebin/plain/bN4D9ovr

I tried to submit the patch to chromium, but they keep ignore my PR for some reasons

links seem to be dead

You seem to have the expectation that your use case of forking chromium, making changes, and being able to compile it quickly should be well supported. Why do you believe that? Why is the fact this is not in fact well supported make you feel like someone is spitting in your face? I don't think the chromium authors have never gone out of their way to indicate it would be easy.

I'm genuinely curious, not judging. From my vantage point it feels like being upset that a golf course isn't hospitable to folks looking to play baseball.

Perhaps he has this old fashioned idea that FOSS should be easy to fork and make changes to. Or, so silly!, that projects should not have tons of bloat and that they should compile fast!

"open source software you can download, change, and compile yourself!"

"This takes a long time to compile"

"You're just trying to play basketball on a golf course"

I'm curious, not judging, why you think this is a reasonable position to have.

Have you looked at ccache?

How will it increase the load on your server? They're not increasing the frequency of releases, just reducing the amount of time the release/beta process takes.

I missed the _how_ part? Is it policy/process and automation or more of one than the other or?

But what's the reason for faster Chrome releases?

I guess to that bug/security fixes and new features get to people sooner but I'm not sure which one Google cares more about - they're running a lot of TV ads at the moment about how Chrome is good at security (not explicitly saying it's a secure browser) but I guess that GMail/Youtube/etc benefit from new JavaScript and CSS features too.

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