Monday 14 February 2022

Re: Should we remove chromium-browser from the archive?

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 7:33 PM Olivier Tilloy
<olivier.tilloy@canonical.com> wrote:
>
> The chromium-browser package has been a "transitional" package that
> installs the chromium snap since Ubuntu 19.10. Full-fledged deb
> packages are still being built for 18.04.
>
> The question of whether to remove this transitional package from the
> archive altogether has come up, so I'm sharing it here to get insights
> and feedback from a wider audience before making an informed decision.
>
> Some features of the deb package that are worth taking into account:
> - /usr/bin/{chromium-browser,chromedriver} symlinks to their snap counterparts
> - a postinst script that installs alternatives for x-www-browser and
> gnome-www-browser (unfortunately snapd doesn't have any mechanism for
> this yet)
> - a custom apport hook that collects additional information about the
> snap and its dependencies
> - did I miss any other features?
>
> Orthogonal to this, it's been reported that the version number of the
> deb is confusing, because it contains a random outdated chromium
> version, but this can be addressed separately if the package remains
> in the archive with the use of an epoch to reset the version scheme to
> something saner.
>
> I welcome your thoughts on the matter.

Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts on the matter.
There are indeed compelling reasons to keep chromium-browser in the
archive for now, at least until snapd provides tighter integration
with the host system, so it is staying.
I'm of course happy to revisit this decision at a later time in light
of new arguments.

Olivier

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