Building Chromium at a distro? Here's your copium

The article discusses the challenges of building Chromium on different Linux distributions due to changes introduced in Chromium M120. Gentoo maintainers initiated a practice of segregating short-living patches into separate repositories, influencing other distros to follow suit. However, issues arose with the M120 release, impacting V8 and absl::optional functionalities. Consequently, many distros, including Alpine, Arch, Gentoo, and Fedora, began building Chromium with LLVM's libc++ source code to address these challenges. Despite efforts to patch and maintain Chromium compatibility with GCC and libstdc++, issues persist with clang and certain architectures. The article emphasizes the lack of significant changes in Chromium's core purpose under Google's ownership and offers a coping mechanism through a common set of Chromium patches. The author, Lauren N. Liberda, highlights the ongoing challenges and uncertainties in maintaining Chromium compatibility across various distributions.