Cht-core: Determine if we can build/release Crosswalk with the latest Chrome

[garethbowen]

Crosswalk has been end of lifed in part because Android has had evergreen webview for a while now, so the version of Chrome we ship with our app is getting relatively old. Crosswalk is still really useful for us because of the ability to use 100% of the phones storage so we want to keep using it.

Find out how much work is involved in updating the version of Chrome and rebuilding Crosswalk either with the community or just for our app.

[alxndrsn]

Tenta _appear_ to be maintaining more up-to-date versions. Here's a commit which appears to be Chrome 64: https://github.com/tenta-browser/crosswalk/commit/b84b8597bbb5d2b0e98bfae3dc3deba3c7c4bd97 (branch: https://github.com/tenta-browser/crosswalk/tree/chromium_64).

[garethbowen]

There's also ongoing discussion in the community: https://github.com/crosswalk-project/crosswalk/issues/4001

[rmhowe]

So it looks like various parties are interested in updating the chromium version within crosswalk and many have tried but none have really gotten anywhere. Someone managed to get an apk for chromium v53 but didn't seem very confident in it and then gave up (which confused me because I think the last stable crosswalk was with chromium 53). Tangerine seem to need to update it as well but are now looking at tenta.

It looks like the best bet at the moment is tenta who appear to have a functional crosswalk with chromium 64, I'll attempt to build it but may get very very stuck. I'm also not entirely convinced it will work as the chromium-crosswalk repo has been forked and updated but the v8-crosswalk has not been updated, not sure if this is necessary though.

[menelike]

@rmhowe Had you any success in building it?
Those submodules from bitbucket seem to be private only?

[rmhowe]

Yes that was as far as I could get in building, running gclient sync from the tenta repo errors due to the private bitbucket modules.

I've reached out to the tenta team to see if they've managed to get crosswalk working with chromium 64 and whether they'd be willing to make the binaries publicly available.

[rmhowe]

So far no response from tenta, and this seems to be other people's experience as well.

Building crosswalk seems like it would take a huge amount of time so I think the best option here is to keep an eye on the crosswalk issue referenced above and see if anyone manages to make any significant progress, but for the moment stick with the latest official crosswalk release which I believe is chromium 53. In the meantime I think this issue can be closed, not sure what the most appropriate label for it is now, either Won't do or Ready as it's an investigation ticket?