Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 07:31:09PM +0100, Tomas Pospisek wrote: > > Obviously I cannot promise anything here; I'm currently even more in the > > dark > > than you. :-) But if there's a list of relevant bugs somewhere, I at least > > have a place to try to understand the issues at hand. The one bug I had in mind when I wrote my email was this: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1250231 However I saw in the past also some cases of a bug reported, few versions later bug fixed, but actually the bug wasn't even touched, so most likely somebody else noticed "internally" but never saw the bug report. Besides that, look at the stupidly long list of patches. I consider it fair to say that for most of them chromium upstream could just trivially incorporate build flags or support our needs: none of those patches change foundamental behaviour or so. > PS: I have included Mattia Rizzolo, Michael Gilbert and the Debian Chromium > Team directly in the recipients, to be sure they see this email. I do hope > you all do not mind. That's all fine with me (also, I'm subscribed to d-d@ (and d-release@), but I'm not actually involved in the maintenance. Rather, I'm adding here Michel Le Bihan who actually maintained chromium in the past 8+ months, and I can only say that he did a great job, despite the short time. -- regards, Mattia Rizzolo GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18 4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540 .''`. More about me: https://mapreri.org : :' : Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri `. `'` Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia `- signature.asc Description: PGP signature
ungoogled-chromium? [was: Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)]
On 06.12.21 20:43, Noah Meyerhans wrote: On Sun, Dec 05, 2021 at 07:58:17PM +0300, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote: So what's happening with chromium in both sid and stable? I saw on d-release that it was removed from testing (#998676 and #998732), with a discussion about ending security support for it in stable. The problem really is lack of maintenance. In my opinion, chromium deserves an active *team* to support it in Debian. <...> The security team doesn't have the bandwidth to do it themselves, they need a team to help them. Sorry for a silly question, but whatʼs so wrong with the build done by linuxmint.com [1], so Debian needs a whole team to duplicate their effort? Itʼs for Debian 10 (i. e. oldstable) as of now, but works fine at Sid in my (limited) experience. Well, you can start with the fact that the Mint chromium source packages don't even include the chromium source, let alone the sources for all the other things they build (NodeJS, and more). The biggest difficulty, as far as I can tell from my look at Chromium from several months ago, is that our patch set [1] needs a lot of attention with every chromium release. Mint doesn't apply any patches at all to the source, at least none of any real complexity. One lesson we may take from Mint, though, is that it's not worth trying to patch Chromium as much as we'd like. Anything that we can do to simplify the Chromium packaging will help us keep the package up-to-date, which in turn will help us keep our users safer. In my opinion, we should be pretty aggressive about dropping as many of the Chromium patches as possible, even if that means we link against bundled/vendored dependencies. Legal/licensing considerations are still important and I don't know if we actually *can* ship builds based on the bundled stuff. But based on the number of patches we have to disable various things [2] or build against system dependencies [3], I can't help but think we'd have an easier time keeping this package fresh if we could drop some of those. noah 1. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/blob/master/debian/patches/series 2. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/tree/master/debian/patches/disable 3. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/tree/master/debian/patches/system I'd also like to point out, that the ungoogled-chromium project has some overlap in goals with Debian and it'd possibly be interessing to join forces: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-debian (I have been running an ungoogled-chromium for a while (ca. a year ago?), however at that time their chrome wasn't extremely stable so I gave up again. Does anybody have experience using it recently?) *t
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
On 07.12.21 19:14, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 07:05:29PM +0100, Tomas Pospisek wrote: So you being a DD and soon at work on Chromium the hope was that maybe you could conduct some of upstream love to care about the world outside of Google (?), here in particular Debian's effort to provide Chromium to its users... to help that effort. Obviously I cannot promise anything here; I'm currently even more in the dark than you. :-) But if there's a list of relevant bugs somewhere, I at least have a place to try to understand the issues at hand. I think it'd be best if Debian's chromium maintainers (see the recipients of this email) would reply to this question, however if you go to chromium's BTS page [1] then all the bug reports that have a "↝" (a wavy arrow) have been forwarded upstream and - judging by the fact that the bugs are still open in the BTS - have probably not been dealt with upstream. *t [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=chromium;dist=unstable PS: I have included Mattia Rizzolo, Michael Gilbert and the Debian Chromium Team directly in the recipients, to be sure they see this email. I do hope you all do not mind.
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 07:05:29PM +0100, Tomas Pospisek wrote: > So you being a DD and soon at work on Chromium the hope was that maybe you > could conduct some of upstream love to care about the world outside of > Google (?), here in particular Debian's effort to provide Chromium to its > users... to help that effort. Hi, Obviously I cannot promise anything here; I'm currently even more in the dark than you. :-) But if there's a list of relevant bugs somewhere, I at least have a place to try to understand the issues at hand. /* Steinar */ -- Homepage: https://www.sesse.net/
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
Hi Steinar, On 07.12.21 10:07, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 08:55:00AM +0100, Tomas Pospisek wrote: I note that Steinar Gunderson [1] is now employed by Google to work on Chrome, so maybe there could be hope talking to him? It's right that I'm just joining the Chromium team, although probably not in an area that is interesting to you (Style & Font). (And of course, I don't really have a say in anything yet, and I don't know anyone yet :-) ) I don't have the context here; what specifically is it that you're interested in getting fixed? problem explanation starts at [1]. Let me try to summarize (those in the known please correct me): * chromium in Debian is *way* behind upstream * many security issues that are fixed upstream but not in Debian * chromium maintenance team is too small wrt to maintenance load * Debian is carrying many patches * Debian has reported bugs and patches upstream in the bug tracker * at least some build/build-options related * no feedback at all from upstream, issues persist * upstream's perception and attention seems to be limited to internal bug tracker So you being a DD and soon at work on Chromium the hope was that maybe you could conduct some of upstream love to care about the world outside of Google (?), here in particular Debian's effort to provide Chromium to its users... to help that effort. *t [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/12/msg00079.html
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 08:55:00AM +0100, Tomas Pospisek wrote: > I note that Steinar Gunderson [1] is now employed by Google to work on > Chrome, so maybe there could be hope talking to him? Hi, It's right that I'm just joining the Chromium team, although probably not in an area that is interesting to you (Style & Font). (And of course, I don't really have a say in anything yet, and I don't know anyone yet :-) ) I don't have the context here; what specifically is it that you're interested in getting fixed? /* Steinar */ -- Homepage: https://www.sesse.net/
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
Noah Meyerhans wrote: > The biggest difficulty, as far as I can tell from my look at Chromium from > several months ago, is that our patch set [1] needs a lot of attention with > every chromium release. And let me ask another silly question: where can we actually see a CI log for a failed build? buildd.d.o only features the latest successful one (for 93rd Chromium). signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
Noah Meyerhans wrote: > On Sun, Dec 05, 2021 at 07:58:17PM +0300, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote: >> >> So what's happening with chromium in both sid and stable? I saw on >> >> d-release that it was removed from testing (#998676 and #998732), with a >> >> discussion about ending security support for it in stable. >> > >> > The problem really is lack of maintenance. In my opinion, chromium >> > deserves an active *team* to support it in Debian. <...> The security >> > team doesn't have the bandwidth to do it themselves, they need a team to >> > help them. >> >> Sorry for a silly question, but whatʼs so wrong with the build done by >> linuxmint.com [1], so Debian needs a whole team to duplicate their effort? >> Itʼs for Debian 10 (i. e. oldstable) as of now, but works fine at Sid in my >> (limited) experience. > > Well, you can start with the fact that the Mint chromium source packages > don't even include the chromium source, If the fact is that their ad-hoc downloader does not generate orig tarball, I fail to see much trouble here. They are using the same `chromium-browser-official` releases. > let alone the sources for all the other things they build (NodeJS, and more). Well, they actually do not build NodeJS, but use a blob from nodejs.org (just like Google does). Nothing good, of course, but I hope itʼs not the case that Chromium build fails when NodeJS is actually built from sources that are supposed to correspond to that blob? Or had nobody tried that? If the latter, why? Is there some policy, that mandates that preinstalled node(1) must be used? > One lesson we may take from Mint, though, is that it's not worth trying to > patch Chromium as much as we'd like. Anything that we can do to simplify the > Chromium packaging will help us keep the package up-to-date, which in turn > will help us keep our users safer. In my opinion, we should be pretty > aggressive about dropping as many of the Chromium patches as possible, even > if that means we link against bundled/vendored dependencies. Indeed. As a passer-by I really wonder why that path had been taken at all in the first place. If Chromium devs are into hard-pinning dependencies, they presumably have good reasons to do that. > Legal/licensing considerations are still important and I don't know if we > actually *can* ship builds based on the bundled stuff. I cannot imagine how it can be illegal for Debian what is legal for Google or Flathub in this case. Were there some prior discussions about that? signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
On 06.12.21 22:53, Mattia Rizzolo wrote: On Mon, Dec 06, 2021 at 08:53:37PM +0100, Paul Gevers wrote: I have good experience with some of my upstreams where they supported me by adapting their build system to enable building without the bundled/vendored dependencies. Has this been tried? Would it be worth pursuing? It has been, yes. I was looking when Micheal reported a few bugs (after my prodding) to get a few build issues solved (actual FTBFS when building with specific build flags). Even those bug reports were completely ignored with no answer whatsoever; the patches also ignored. I'm led to believe the chromium team is not really playing with the community at all, rather they are just following their internal bug tracker instead. Likewise, they are obviously not interested in supporting anything that is not the official Google Chrome build (if it can even said they are "supoprting" that). I note that Steinar Gunderson [1] is now employed by Google to work on Chrome, so maybe there could be hope talking to him? *t [1] http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2021-12-05-16-41_leaving_mysql.html
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
On Mon, Dec 06, 2021 at 08:53:37PM +0100, Paul Gevers wrote: > I have good experience with some of my upstreams where they supported me by > adapting their build system to enable building without the bundled/vendored > dependencies. Has this been tried? Would it be worth pursuing? It has been, yes. I was looking when Micheal reported a few bugs (after my prodding) to get a few build issues solved (actual FTBFS when building with specific build flags). Even those bug reports were completely ignored with no answer whatsoever; the patches also ignored. I'm led to believe the chromium team is not really playing with the community at all, rather they are just following their internal bug tracker instead. Likewise, they are obviously not interested in supporting anything that is not the official Google Chrome build (if it can even said they are "supoprting" that). -- regards, Mattia Rizzolo GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18 4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540 .''`. More about me: https://mapreri.org : :' : Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri `. `'` Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia `- signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
Hi, On 06-12-2021 20:43, Noah Meyerhans wrote: One lesson we may take from Mint, though, is that it's not worth trying to patch Chromium as much as we'd like. Anything that we can do to simplify the Chromium packaging will help us keep the package up-to-date, which in turn will help us keep our users safer. In my opinion, we should be pretty aggressive about dropping as many of the Chromium patches as possible, even if that means we link against bundled/vendored dependencies. Legal/licensing considerations are still important and I don't know if we actually *can* ship builds based on the bundled stuff. But based on the number of patches we have to disable various things [2] or build against system dependencies [3], I can't help but think we'd have an easier time keeping this package fresh if we could drop some of those. I have good experience with some of my upstreams where they supported me by adapting their build system to enable building without the bundled/vendored dependencies. Has this been tried? Would it be worth pursuing? Paul OpenPGP_signature Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
On Sun, Dec 05, 2021 at 07:58:17PM +0300, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote: > >> So what's happening with chromium in both sid and stable? I saw on > >> d-release that it was removed from testing (#998676 and #998732), with a > >> discussion about ending security support for it in stable. > > > > The problem really is lack of maintenance. In my opinion, chromium deserves > > an active *team* to support it in Debian. <...> The security team doesn't > > have the bandwidth to do it themselves, they need a team to help them. > > Sorry for a silly question, but whatʼs so wrong with the build done by > linuxmint.com [1], so Debian needs a whole team to duplicate their effort? > Itʼs for Debian 10 (i. e. oldstable) as of now, but works fine at Sid in my > (limited) experience. > Well, you can start with the fact that the Mint chromium source packages don't even include the chromium source, let alone the sources for all the other things they build (NodeJS, and more). The biggest difficulty, as far as I can tell from my look at Chromium from several months ago, is that our patch set [1] needs a lot of attention with every chromium release. Mint doesn't apply any patches at all to the source, at least none of any real complexity. One lesson we may take from Mint, though, is that it's not worth trying to patch Chromium as much as we'd like. Anything that we can do to simplify the Chromium packaging will help us keep the package up-to-date, which in turn will help us keep our users safer. In my opinion, we should be pretty aggressive about dropping as many of the Chromium patches as possible, even if that means we link against bundled/vendored dependencies. Legal/licensing considerations are still important and I don't know if we actually *can* ship builds based on the bundled stuff. But based on the number of patches we have to disable various things [2] or build against system dependencies [3], I can't help but think we'd have an easier time keeping this package fresh if we could drop some of those. noah 1. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/blob/master/debian/patches/series 2. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/tree/master/debian/patches/disable 3. https://salsa.debian.org/chromium-team/chromium/-/tree/master/debian/patches/system
Re: Bug#995212: chromium: Update to version 94.0.4606.61 (security-fixes)
Paul Gevers wrote: > On 05-12-2021 03:36, Andres Salomon wrote: >> So what's happening with chromium in both sid and stable? I saw on d-release >> that it was removed from testing (#998676 and #998732), with a discussion >> about ending security support for it in stable. > > The problem really is lack of maintenance. In my opinion, chromium deserves > an active *team* to support it in Debian. <...> The security team doesn't > have the bandwidth to do it themselves, they need a team to help them. Sorry for a silly question, but whatʼs so wrong with the build done by linuxmint.com [1], so Debian needs a whole team to duplicate their effort? Itʼs for Debian 10 (i. e. oldstable) as of now, but works fine at Sid in my (limited) experience. [1] http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/upstream/c/chromium/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
