CroFT

Chromium Flatpak Toolkit

CroFT is a utility for managing a Chromium source tree tied to a Flatpak manifest, actively used for maintaining the primary Chromium Flatpak. The end goal is to be able to, in theory, have this tool (and the workflows it supports) shared amongst anyone else who wants to maintain some source-based Chromium derivative Flatpak, in order to streamline routine maintenance.

Downloads

Binary releases of this will periodically be posted to the releases page.

Building

Install the Dart SDK, then run:

$ dart pub get
$ dart run build_runner build
$ dart2native bin/croft.dart -o croft

then move the croft binary to wherever you want.

Configuration

CroFT requires a ~/.config/croft.yaml to work, using the following format:

# Map of Chromium-based Flatpak projects
projects:
  chromium:
    # Directory containing the Flatpak manifest and related files
    manifest-dir: ~/manifests/chromium
    # Filename of the Flatpak manifest
    manifest-name: org.chromium.Chromium.yaml
    # Module in the Flatpak manifest that builds the Chromium project itself
    main-module: chromium
    # Directory containing the Chromium source tree
    chromium-source-root: ~/code/chromium/src
    # (optional, defaults to 'docker') The docker or podman command to run
    docker-command: docker
    # (optional, defaults to 'false') Build a custom toolchain to configure FFmpeg
    use-custom-ffmpeg-toolchain: false
# (optional) Default project name in the projects map above
default-project: chromium

Basic terms

• "Component" is referring to either the root Chromium repository ("chromium") or the FFmpeg repository inside ("ffmpeg").
• "Upstream revision" is the last revision that's part of upstream, i.e. the revision right before any locally added commits.

Workflow to update Chromium

Updating the local source tree

First off, downloading the new sources. In your Chromium source tree, git fetch --tags, then checkout the tag corresponding to the latest release, and gclient sync. Note that, if any commits are present in the FFmpeg repository, this will fail. You can work around that by resetting it first via croft destructive-reset ffmpeg upstream, but note that this will discard any work in the FFmpeg repository.

Now, the current patches in the manifest can be applied to Chromium and FFmpeg via croft apply-patches chromium and croft apply-patches ffmpeg, respectively. croft apply-patches is a thin wrapper over git am -3, so on any patch conflicts, you can make changes as needed and then do git am --continue.

If the upstream FFmpeg configuration was updated, it will conflict with our FFmpeg configuration patch, so that one can be skipped via git am --skip and recreated later (see below). If you already know there will be a conflict, you can skip the configuration patch altogether via croft apply-patches ffmpeg --skip-ffmpeg-config.

Updating the FFmpeg configuration

If the FFmpeg configuration was updated and needs to be regenerated (see above), use croft generate-ffmpeg-config to regenerate and commit the new configuration. This command requires Docker or Podman in order to work.

Exporting the patches

Once all patches are updated, run croft export-patches chromium and croft export-patches ffmpeg to export the patches back to the manifest folder, then you can commit and push those as desired.

Workflow for modifying & creating patches

Working with the upstream revision

You can use croft get-upstream-revision to print out the upstream revision.

croft rebase-on-upstream chromium|ffmpeg will open an interactive rebase targeting said upstream revision, allowing you to rebase just the patch commits as needed.

Building Chromium

In order to access the Flatpak build environment, use croft build-shell, which will build all the modules in the manifest before the main one, then open up a shell in the resulting build environment (using flatpak-builder --run).

If you want to run an entire manifest build, you can use croft build-release, which will build the entire Flatpak manifest, from top to bottom. Due to the large size of the Chromium sources, this will also delete any previous Chromium build directories left over in your Flatpak cache before it starts.

Usage on arm64 hosts

Chromium's default prebuilt toolchains, which required to generate the FFmpeg config, only run on x64, so a custom-built toolchain needs to be used. You can set use-custom-ffmpeg-toolchain: true in the project configuration and run croft build-ffmpeg-toolchain in order to build a separate copy of the Chromium build toolchain for use in generating the FFmpeg config. After that, croft generate-ffmpeg-config will automatically use the new toolchain.