[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.