Chromium on UNE Update

[Jorge O. Castro]

Hi everyone,

This is a follow up status report from the Chromium-by-default-on-UNE
discussion at UDS. The desktop team have decided to stick with Firefox
for UNE for 10.10, however Chromium is moving into main. Here are the
critical blockers:

 * We don't have a plugin installer, ie. if you go to a Flash site it
sends you to Adobe's webpage instead of just installing the plugin.
 * No langpacks or translations support in lp so we can't translate
Chromium, we have to depend on upstream to do it in one huge thing. :(
 * Doing all the xulrunner packaging changes in order to get the CD
size down AND switching to chromium in one cycle is currently not
feasible with the people we currently have.

And here are other concerns/issues we need to work out. Sorry these
notes are so raw:

- We need spidermonkey/xulrunner for couch, so we still have to ship
it, AND add Chromium:
 - Chromium is double the size of Firefox last time Chris checked.
(Needs followup)
 - Splitting spidermonkey is non-trivial.
 - CD Space is already over size!
 - Shipping a local spidermonkey copy with couch - security team won't
like that, Chris to investigate.
- We still need to figure out the workflow with upstream on how to do
security updates.
 - We have 1 to 2 week period workflow with Firefox to push out
security updates so we have time to test and then upload, but Chromium
just releases once they have a fix without a grace period.
- We still want to switch, it just might be for M+1.
- Printing is still bad, low priority for upstream, jorge to
investigate process.
- The stable update process for Firefox has taken so much of Chris'
time that there's 0 time to investigate fixing these issues.
- Moving it to main because we have well defined security processes
that is faster instead of poor fta dealing with it in universe.
- We still want to provide the best Chromium experience, so it will be
in the archive and in main, for people who prefer Chrome it's already
easy to install from Google.
- Netbooks don't come with optical drives, 1GB USB stick installer for the win?
   - Netbooks are supposed to be light!
 - We need to figure out how responsive upstream is with bug workflow. (jorge)

Rick and Evan Martin (from the Chromium team) have already discussed
these items, so upstream is aware of our current issues.

Want to help? Our browser team is always looking for help and
volunteers, if you want to dive in then check out the information
here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam If you know anything about
printing on Linux then I encourage you to look at helping upstream
finish off their printing support.

-- 
Jorge Castro
jorge (at) ubuntu.com
External Project Developer Relations
Canonical Ltd.