[arch-dev-public] Potential removal of Chromium in ~2 months

[Evangelos Foutras]

Just a quick heads up that I am considering dropping Chromium from
[extra] a week or two before the Chromium 82 stable release (~April 28).
The reason for this is that our API keys no longer work for geolocation
requests and there is no clear upstream guidance on how to resolve this
issue. [1]

When I created these API keys back in 2013, there was a semi-official
effort by the Chrome Team to support distro builds of Chromium in regard
to accessing Google APIs; a few minor hiccups along the way were quickly
resolved. I feel this arrangement is starting to fall apart (in spite of
some upstream Chrome developers' best efforts).

To make a long story short, I consider broken geolocation sufficient
reason for removal. I don't mind it being broken for my own use, but
shipping a package with broken functionality due to lack of upstream
support does not sit well with me.

To protect against systems with outdated Chromium (following the stable
release of version 82), at the beginning of April I intend to post a
news item about the need to switch to another browser. That is assuming
no solution is found and nobody objects to the removal or wishes to
continue maintenance of the package with reduced functionality.

[1]
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-packagers/ZytNtRam5II