[Pkg-chromium-maint] CEF in Debian?

Steinar H. Gunderson sesse at debian.org
Sat Feb 24 13:06:39 UTC 2018


Hi Chromium maintainers,

I'm wondering if there's a chance of having CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework)
in Debian. For those who don't know, CEF is a library that enables easy use
of Chromium from other applications, either as a UI or for offscreen
rendering -- my own video mixer Nageru is getting CEF support these days,
which is why I'm interested.

CEF typically makes one release branch per Chromium release and has some
scripts to download and build against said Chromium source, but it would seem
unwise to make a Debian package that way; given the rate at which browsers
need security updates, I can't see that Debian would want to ship two
slightly different versions of Chromium. (Also, the CEF page warns that they
may be patching the Chromium source, but it comes in form of patch files if
so.) However, I don't think it should be hard to build CEF against Debian's
Chromium, either, assuming CEF can actually get at Debian's Chromium source.

I guess there would be two semi-reasonable options:

  1. chromium starts shipping a chromium-source package that CEF can build
     against (so newer point releases of chromium would mean binNMU-ing cef).
  2. The chromium source package also contains source code for CEF, and
     builds the appropriate library.

In any case, if one ships a new major release of Chromium (I guess this is
the strategy for security updates these days?), one would also need a new
major release of CEF.

Beyond the Chromium dependency, CEF appears to be fairly simple to build;
it basically needs only CMake and Ninja, and Debian (jessie or newer)
is explicitly supported from upstream.

Thoughts? Do you think this would be doable somehow?

/* Steinar */
-- 
Homepage: https://www.sesse.net/



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