alt Hacker NewsAlso worth noting https://lwn.net/Articles/1097760/ - Gentoo has given up on building Chromium from source, because upstream "do not test their builds with any of their allegedly 'optional' features disabled" and "[i]n the case of Chromium, keeping all the toggle switches working (despite chronic neglect from upstream) is a monumental, nigh-insurmountable task." One maintainer said he could not possibly test all the combinations of USE flags in the Gentoo build, since his laptop took 15-16 hours to compile Chromium (I presume for just one build, which would have to be repeated 2^N times to test all possible flag combinations).
Much more in the LWN article, I'm not going to quote everything.
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upstream "do not test their builds with any of their allegedly 'optional' features disabled"
I've noticed this too and it's really annoying. Their CI doesn't even run `gn` for the use-flag permutations, which would take a trivial amount of compute. They could easily compile-but-not-link for every combination of flags in CI too at only a modest compute expenditure. At least that way people who break the #ifdef maze would be forced to fix it.
To be fair though: that's a gentoo fault. They want to be able to be as customizable as possible, which is fine, but if you support all flag-combinations, you are going to either test them all, or forego testing them. It's also a bit awkward that they don't mention this with regards to the linux kernel. Are the use flags that limited to begin with?
I wonder how the Helium [0] project solves this, since they also work off of an opinionated-ish Chromium base.
[0] https://helium.computer