[jsizz]

> sometimes they cause problems (hello, Debian weak keys).

> until recently nobody was packaging Chromium for example.

To name one example, SlackBuilds.org has had Chromium since 2010, although admittedly that's not so long ago as the Debian weak key cockup, which was 2006.

Maybe your examples could use an upgrade to the latest stable version.

[drewcrawford]

Chromium may have been packaged in 2010, but it was released three years before. The Debian weak keys "cockup" may have been created in 2006, but it was discovered two years later. Maintainers had long windows of time to add value. Did they?

I don't mean anything personal by it. If I was maintaining 38 packages on my nights and weekends I'd do a bad job too.

But examples don't go out of date unless you present some force that takes 30k unmaintainable packages and turns them into 50k maintainable packages. What specific advance in software maintenance do you believe improved the art of software maintenance by an OOM?

But if you want to talk recent examples, we could talk about how nobody's packaging Swift.

[ploxiln]

Chromium only became compatible with linux in 2010. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-chrome-for-ho...

Arch Linux packaging files have source history going back to then as well.

Chromium is also an example of a package that took a long time to appear in other distros, because it's really written with the app mindset. It copies and incompatibly customizes most of its dependencies. No one would consider that a great idea for ongoing maintenance and security patching for a typical project, but of course this is a google product-oriented thing with nearly a thousand well-above-average-skill developers assigned, so it's not a problem for them to manage surprisingly huge volumes of code and changes.

Web browsers like Chromium are also a good example of the kind of modern software which doesn't work well with the debian release model, because it's "unsupported and practically broken" in like half a year. That's not true for the "make" utility, or for gimp or inkscape or libreoffice or audacious or countless other useful applications and tools which are not browsers.

I really don't like the fact that modern browsers are a crazy-train and there's just no getting off it.

[digi_owl]

Yeah Chromium is a mess. To get and build the source you first have get the special tool set they use from their git repo.