[IMPORTANT] Experimental features in Chromium derivatives

[Andrew R. Whalley]

(BCC teams/individuals with Chromium derivatives)

Greetings!

If you build Chromium for end users, please ensure you set build flags correctly to prevent functionality or stability problems.

To improve testing coverage, Chromium developer builds enable all experimental features by default, even some which are not ready to be shipped to end users. Unfortunately, many Chromium derivatives ship with the same settings, which can cause problems. In particular, such builds of M56 enabled two features which when combined had a bug that caused SSL connection failures against some servers.

Chromium packages and derivatives must set the following build flag for an end-user configuration:

fieldtrial_testing_like_official_build=true

This flag sets all field trials to their default states. See also the original announcement and some more context.

In a later revision, we will be revising the build flags to better distinguish end-user builds from developer builds. We will send another announcement to the chromium-packagers group once the change is made. If you maintain a Chromium package or derivative, please join that group to be informed of this and future announcements.

Cheers,

Andrew on behalf of the Chrome team

[Nicholas]

The GN declaration for the flag looks like this:

    fieldtrial_testing_like_official_build = is_chrome_branded

I'm curious why the default value uses is_chrome_branded instead of is_official_build. I thought the purpose of is_official_build was for packagers to produce builds suitable for end users?

[Lei Zhang]

+Alexei

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[Alexei Svitkine]

Right now, is_official_build is meant only to enable optimization changes (i.e. compiler/build options) rather than functional changes. So that's why we're not re-using that.

There are some proposals to change this (e.g. is_official_build becomes is_optimized_build and we create an is_end_user_build which will set both is_optimized_build and the field trial testing config flag).

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[Torne (Richard Coles)]

There are definitely other functional changes to the build that are conditional on it already, and have been for a long time. (there's 95 files that use it as an ifdef). I don't think there's any need to have a flag that only affects some particular definition of what's an optimization here, and we should just declare that is_official_build already means "for end users" :)

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[Dirk Pranke]

While your point about lots of other things depending on it is entirely valid, it's not at all clear to me that defining "is_official_build" to mean "for end users" instead of "fully optimized" is indeed the right way to address that problem.

-- Dirk

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