Chromium, the open-source upstream project for Google's Chrome browser, is a popular choice among Linux users. It has also earned a reputation as difficult for Linux distributions to package and build. Its complex build system, bundled dependencies, and frequent releases have led the maintainers of the Gentoo Chromium package to give up on maintaining it.
Gentoo focuses on letting users build their own software from source using the Portage software-management tool. Packagers write ebuild files, which contain the information Portage needs to build software, and users build packages with emerge, the command-line interface for Portage. Building from source gives users flexibility through USE flags, which set compile-time options. For Chromium, a user might employ the -bundled-toolchain USE flag to compile with their system's version of Clang. That flag is optional on x86-64 systems but required on other architectures, since the bundled toolchain ships only for x86-64. Chromium is currently not available as a binary package from Gentoo due to problems building the package with proprietary codecs.
Gentoo handles abandoned packages differently from many distributions. Where Arch Linux, Debian, and Fedora use the term "orphan," Gentoo developers announce "last rites" on the gentoo-dev-announce mailing list. The ebuild is then masked to keep users from accidentally installing an unmaintained package, and other developers can claim maintainership.
Chromium package maintainer Sam James declared last rites on September 24, after a lengthy bug report filed by Roman Žilka. Žilka had complained on September 9 that the latest stable Chromium version contained a catastrophic 602 known vulnerabilities. James replied that Chromium is "horrible to maintain as a source package" and is "easily the package in Gentoo that burns through maintainers the most." He added that maintainers had come close to giving Chromium last rites several times over the years.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing