Announcing: CEF (and possibly related others) builds

Do not post support requests, bug reports or feature requests. Discuss CEF here. Non-CEF related discussion goes in General Discussion!

Announcing: CEF (and possibly related others) builds

Postby ndesktop » Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:03 am

I am planning to build CEF branches (*every* branch, even CEF1 ones) and make them available online as a convenience downloads.
For the moment I started from 3626 down, Windows builds only for the moment.

The idea is to have them available for various scenarios (at this time this is what I'm considering):
- users/coders needing a specific/older/legacy branch build which might or might not be up to date
- coders not having enough C++ knowledge, hardware or time to build themselves
- Mac and Linux builds (this will be quite hardware dependent, since my own falls in the category of not-so-great-hardware)
- other kind of builds (ARM, unsupported Linux distros etc.)
- libraries depending on CEF (such as CefSharp, JCef etc.)

At this time all builds will be done using standard build using vanilla command-line such as
Code: Select all
python C:\cef\automate-git.py --download-dir=C:\cef\3578 --branch=3578 --x64-build --no-debug-build --client-distrib --sandbox-distrib

I won't do packaging and testing other than running cefclient, cefsimple and ceftests.

What I would like to hear from you guys:
- does it sounds like a good idea? (I know Spotify open source, Czarek, amaitland and others maintain such builds, but an extra help won't hurt)
- is there a need for custom/specific builds?
- are the debug builds needed?
- what should be the need and proportion for certain builds? (Meaning, maybe the branch 963 is not in high demand, but someone might have a legacy MFC/CEF1 app).
- what other wrappers/libraries/bindings are available/used (I know of a handful, but since I'm using only C++ there might be more than CefSharp, JCef, CefPython)
- anything else you can think of.
ndesktop
Master
 
Posts: 750
Joined: Thu Dec 03, 2015 10:10 am

Re: Announcing: CEF (and possibly related others) builds

Postby Czarek » Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:23 am

Lately I build CEF from sources only on Linux, as I need to apply specific patches. For Windows and Mac I use Spotify builds.

Spotify already provides old builds for download. However as we know from the history these packages can disappear as it happened with Adobe Builds system. I think that having a backup site for Spotify builds would be nice.
Maintainer of the CEF Python, PHP Desktop and CEF C API projects. My LinkedIn.
User avatar
Czarek
Virtuoso
 
Posts: 1927
Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2011 2:12 am

Re: Announcing: CEF (and possibly related others) builds

Postby salvadordf » Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:54 am

Hi,

I'm the maintainer of the CEF4Delphi project and I think your idea to build old CEF branches is great! :D

CEF4Delphi uses the latest binaries from Spotify and most of the people prefer to have the latest version but some developers needed Windows XP support so I had to create a different project called OldCEF4Delphi which uses the 2623 branch.

The CEF binaries for the 2623 branch are available here : https://github.com/salvadordf/OldCEF4De ... 3_binaries

The DCEF3 project also has copies of some old CEF builds here :

From time to time I receive an email from some developer asking for the CEF binaries with proprietary codecs but nobody else is asking me for other builds.

However, what I personally miss is an ARM build. At this moment CEF4Delphi only supports Windows but I would love to support Linux (x86 and ARM) too. It would be the perfect excuse to buy an ARM board (RaspberryPi ? ) :P
Maintainer of the CEF4Delphi, WebView4Delphi, WebUI4Delphi and WebUI4CSharp projects.
User avatar
salvadordf
Expert
 
Posts: 129
Joined: Sun Dec 18, 2016 8:39 am
Location: Spain

Re: Announcing: CEF (and possibly related others) builds

Postby magreenblatt » Thu Feb 21, 2019 5:10 pm

Are you planning to host the downloads on a website associated with a particular company?

Regarding current branches:

  • I think it could be helpful to provide an automated builder for CEF derivative projects that don't already have one. There are also free alternatives like the ones discussed here.
  • I would not recommend competing with Spotify as a builder of supported CEF branches. I think having multiple build sources for those would prove confusing to the community.
Regarding older branches:

  • If your interest is to archive/mirror older CEF builds instead of necessarily building them all yourself then you can download newer builds from Spotify and I can provide a pretty good sampling of older builds for win32 specifically (we can discuss further in PM).
  • I think you'll have difficulty building older branches due to changes (depot_tools) and breakages (missing SVN/Git/etc. hosts) in Chromium tooling over time.
  • I think we should be very clear on any download page about the security risks posed by using older Chromium builds.

salvadordf wrote:From time to time I receive an email from some developer asking for the CEF binaries with proprietary codecs but nobody else is asking me for other builds.

I would recommend against providing builds with proprietary codecs enabled. This has potential legal liability.

salvadordf wrote:However, what I personally miss is an ARM build. At this moment CEF4Delphi only supports Windows but I would love to support Linux (x86 and ARM) too. It would be the perfect excuse to buy an ARM board (RaspberryPi ? )

We have the capability (e.g. the tooling exists) to support Linux ARM builds on the Spotify builder but I remain unsure of what GN_DEFINES to use. It seems like they vary depending on the target device. The Spotify builder will support Windows ARM builds in the future (support was recently added in Chromium).
magreenblatt
Site Admin
 
Posts: 12382
Joined: Fri May 29, 2009 6:57 pm

Re: Announcing: CEF (and possibly related others) builds

Postby ndesktop » Fri Feb 22, 2019 2:17 am

magreenblatt wrote:Are you planning to host the downloads on a website associated with a particular company?

No, I am not planning to do this for a company or a website associated with a company.
What I have in mind was a convenience mirror/download especially for older/unmaintained builds and offering also the wrapper/binding libraries for the unwanting/impatient user.

magreenblatt wrote:I think it could be helpful to provide an automated builder for CEF derivative projects that don't already have one. There are also free alternatives like the ones discussed here.

Understood. Then I will gladly get feedback about which ones are in need of builds, since I am still thinking details, that's why I opened the thread in the first place.

magreenblatt wrote:I would not recommend competing with Spotify as a builder of supported CEF branches. I think having multiple build sources for those would prove confusing to the community.

I was waiting for this one.
It is not my intention to do that, but rather make available versions which are not available on Spotify download page, unsupported, legacy etc.
But probably the next fragment about "archive/mirror" obsoletes this.

magreenblatt wrote:If your interest is to archive/mirror older CEF builds instead of necessarily building them all yourself then you can download newer builds from Spotify and I can provide a pretty good sampling of older builds for win32 specifically (we can discuss further in PM).

Looks good to me, I think it's the right solution.

magreenblatt wrote:I think you'll have difficulty building older branches due to changes (depot_tools) and breakages (missing SVN/Git/etc. hosts) in Chromium tooling over time.

Most likely, I did not reached yet the very old zone. Pretty much there is no need to do this anymore, if mirroring older builds is an option.

magreenblatt wrote:I think we should be very clear on any download page about the security risks posed by using older Chromium builds.

Absolutely. Whatever warning texts you think to be displayed, I will propose a draft to your for approval.

magreenblatt wrote:I would recommend against providing builds with proprietary codecs enabled. This has potential legal liability.

As I said, all builds done until now are using vanilla automate-git.py without altering flags (just no-debug, 32 and 64). So no proprietary codecs.
But since the discussion is shifting more to mirror/archive, I think building them myself will be probably not needed anymore.

Remains the derivative projects not having automated builds, or even if they have, having all CEF builds and the derivative projects in a single place can prove convenient.
"All in one place" would be a good term to describe what I have in mind.

Does this looks ok?
ndesktop
Master
 
Posts: 750
Joined: Thu Dec 03, 2015 10:10 am

Re: Announcing: CEF (and possibly related others) builds

Postby salvadordf » Fri Feb 22, 2019 3:06 am

magreenblatt wrote:
salvadordf wrote:From time to time I receive an email from some developer asking for the CEF binaries with proprietary codecs but nobody else is asking me for other builds.

I would recommend against providing builds with proprietary codecs enabled. This has potential legal liability.


Don't worry. I've never built any CEF binaries for several reasons : legal, lack of a suitable computer and lack of time to do it.

magreenblatt wrote:
salvadordf wrote:However, what I personally miss is an ARM build. At this moment CEF4Delphi only supports Windows but I would love to support Linux (x86 and ARM) too. It would be the perfect excuse to buy an ARM board (RaspberryPi ? )

We have the capability (e.g. the tooling exists) to support Linux ARM builds on the Spotify builder but I remain unsure of what GN_DEFINES to use. It seems like they vary depending on the target device. The Spotify builder will support Windows ARM builds in the future (support was recently added in Chromium).


Thank you! :D
Maintainer of the CEF4Delphi, WebView4Delphi, WebUI4Delphi and WebUI4CSharp projects.
User avatar
salvadordf
Expert
 
Posts: 129
Joined: Sun Dec 18, 2016 8:39 am
Location: Spain

Re: Announcing: CEF (and possibly related others) builds

Postby magreenblatt » Fri Feb 22, 2019 10:49 am

ndesktop wrote:No, I am not planning to do this for a company or a website associated with a company.
What I have in mind was a convenience mirror/download especially for older/unmaintained builds and offering also the wrapper/binding libraries for the unwanting/impatient user.

Remains the derivative projects not having automated builds, or even if they have, having all CEF builds and the derivative projects in a single place can prove convenient.
"All in one place" would be a good term to describe what I have in mind.

Does this looks ok?

This sounds OK, but (as a random internet user) I would be reluctant to download binaries from a personal website. Perhaps we can address this at least partly by referencing sha1 hashes that are hosted somewhere official. We could then potentially have multiple mirrors of the binaries along the lines that you're proposing.
magreenblatt
Site Admin
 
Posts: 12382
Joined: Fri May 29, 2009 6:57 pm


Return to CEF Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 19 guests