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Those are all very different levels of difficulty IMO: Linux is almost trivially easy, only slightly harder than the usual configure && make and has very few d

by swiley 7y ago

Those are all very different levels of difficulty IMO: Linux is almost trivially easy, only slightly harder than the usual configure && make and has very few dependencies. Firefox is pretty painful but it's doable with a decent amount of care and bandwidth. Chromium is a fairly typical google project where the recommended first step to building it is to become a google employee but some alternative workarounds are also available if that's not practical.

ohazi 7y ago
The first time I had a reason to build Chromium was ten years ago. I was using a 32-bit machine with 4 GB of RAM, and that's where the story ends.
freeboson 7y ago
Do you have to build chromium with blaze? Or does it use e.g. cmake or something?
- jbroman 7y ago
  It's uses gn, a build system developed for Chromium. That said, on an Ubuntu system the steps to build Chromium are fairly well-documented and straightforward, as long as you have an appropriately beefy system (unfortunately it's a long wait and a fair amount of RAM is required, and Googlers tend to use a distributed build system). https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/linux/build_instructions.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...
  - tedmielczarek 7y ago
    gn is of course a meta-build system, the initials stand for "generate ninja". ninja does the actual build execution. The Firefox build system has a similar homegrown frontend called mozbuild, which generates Makefiles for the actual build.
happosai 7y ago
Nah building is fine, just follow the steps from Debian/Ubuntu/whateverdistro . But trying to contribute is fun. By the time you've danced all the hoops to allow you to contribute, some Google employee has already refactored the code around the bug. Then you have to be fast enough to get your updated patch applied before someone else has reorganized the code again... At some point I started wondering if indeed I'd get the fix in faster by starting to practice whiteboard interviews.
- eholk 7y ago
  > ...some Google employee has already refactored the code around the bug. Then you have to be fast enough to get your updated patch applied before someone else has reorganized the code again... For what it's worth, this is how it work's if you're a Google employee too.

by swiley 7y ago

ohazi 7y ago

The first time I had a reason to build Chromium was ten years ago. I was using a 32-bit machine with 4 GB of RAM, and that's where the story ends.

freeboson 7y ago

Do you have to build chromium with blaze? Or does it use e.g. cmake or something?

jbroman 7y ago
It's uses gn, a build system developed for Chromium. That said, on an Ubuntu system the steps to build Chromium are fairly well-documented and straightforward, as long as you have an appropriately beefy system (unfortunately it's a long wait and a fair amount of RAM is required, and Googlers tend to use a distributed build system). https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/linux/build_instructions.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...
- tedmielczarek 7y ago
  gn is of course a meta-build system, the initials stand for "generate ninja". ninja does the actual build execution. The Firefox build system has a similar homegrown frontend called mozbuild, which generates Makefiles for the actual build.

happosai 7y ago

Nah building is fine, just follow the steps from Debian/Ubuntu/whateverdistro . But trying to contribute is fun. By the time you've danced all the hoops to allow you to contribute, some Google employee has already refactored the code around the bug. Then you have to be fast enough to get your updated patch applied before someone else has reorganized the code again... At some point I started wondering if indeed I'd get the fix in faster by starting to practice whiteboard interviews.

eholk 7y ago
> ...some Google employee has already refactored the code around the bug. Then you have to be fast enough to get your updated patch applied before someone else has reorganized the code again... For what it's worth, this is how it work's if you're a Google employee too.