Chromium build and symlinks outside src

Hi Igor,

You’re asking a good question, one that I don’t think we have an official policy on.

In general, we only support stuff that the project itself directly uses. E.g., we don’t accept patches to code to fix a FreeBSD port because we don’t support FreeBSD or ship a Chrome binary on it. Patches to infrastructure (build files, etc.) are a bit more supported though we would probably still officially only support them if we used them. 

But, I know that there can be real advantages to having your build artifacts be “out of tree” and could see a world where we did want to use and support such a configuration directly. 

And, on the third hand, I can also imagine that there might be cases where we would accept a patch that explicitly broke symlinks because we really needed whatever was being changed and viewed it as an acceptable tradeoff, but I don’t know if those would actually be a real world scenarios.

I would be reluctant to say much more without looking at real changes and understanding their impact. I hope this helps a little, even though I realize it doesn’t resolve your question one way or another.

If you had a concrete proposal for how to enable such a configuration (and why that configuration is useful), I would certainly be happy to look at it.

— Dirk