add opt-in support for chromium network stack (rama-chromium)

[GlenDC]

C++ Integration of the Chromium network stack to be used for client purposes. It would be an opt-in feature. Probably as a separate crate, e.g. rama-chromium, as it would be a pretty heavy dependency to pull in.

This should in theory make the network traffic identical on the client side, as long as you also configure it the same way.

Not on the immediate roadmap however given we still have plenty of other work to be done...

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[lxrst]

As someone who's had to bind to Google projects built with Google-made build systems, this is going to be painful.
You probably want to run the Chromium build in CI. The build.rs strategy would get very messy.

[GlenDC]

Yes it's going to be a lot of work initially and for maintenance as well, I do realise that. This is the reason that this is something that will only be picked up once there is funding for it or in near future when I found time for it to do it anyway.

The initial work will be split up in two phases:

• create a C++ Library with the networking code extracted out of the original chromium project, with a simple C-like wrapper around it, so the FFI will be easier. This should also include plenty of notes and references to easily keep that part of the code up to date with the upstream code
• create the Rust wrapper around it so it can be used as an alternative web client backend

Either way nothing that I want the project to tackle now on already. And will always be optional. By default we'll do it all in Rust.

[lxrst]

Oh ok, I was thinking of just using the Chromium source repo.
Cutting out their build system would make it a lot easier.

I think they use NSS internally, so #125 might need to happen first.

[GlenDC]

No, NSS is Firefox. Chromium (and thus chrome) is Boringssl.
Good thing is that Browser UA's ship their own SSL library, so not really platform dependent.

[lxrst]

Sorry, their OCSP implementation uses NSS.
Not sure why