Bringing back Intel (x86_64) builds for Ungoogled Chromium macOS.

[Cubik65536]

This issue is used to track the progress for bring back the Intel (x86_64) builds to Ungoogled Chromium macOS.

Background

Since the update to Chromium 131, Google made a lot of changes, like [5894764] (also see ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium#3089 (comment)) and [5868514] (also see https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-macos/actions/runs/11963693332), to take advantage of the new macOS 15 SDK. These changes broke our GitHub Action CI/CD pipeline that automatically build & release each version, as they were at macOS 13 and macOS 14 for x86_64 (Intel-based Mac) and arm64 (Apple Silicon Mac) respectively.

The fix for the Apple Silicon side is easier, as there is GitHub-hosted macOS 15 runner on arm processor that is in public preview state, so the fix was simply to switch the arm64 build to that runner.

However, GitHub is not updating the OS of the GitHub-hosted runner for Intel-based macOS runners. They are stuck at macOS 13 (till now, see this) unless larger runners are used. Considering the per minute pricing of $0.12 for macOS large runners (they are not free even for public repositories), if we go by around 12-hours-minimum time to build x86_64 builds in the past, it would cost us around $86 (12*60*0.12) per build. Even the improved computing resources cut that to 3 hours (that is a fourth of previous time), $21-$22 per build is still too much, turning this to actually not a solution at all.

I was also unable to get a physical Intel Mac nor some any cloud-based server service to self-host a runner.

This is why there's no Intel builds for Ungoogled Chromium macOS since https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-macos/releases/tag/131.0.6778.85-1.1.

Also see:

• ci: Use macOS 15 to build #206
• ci: Disable x86-64 #208

What's now?

I spent my time since 131.0.6778.85 to try to directly build x86_64 binaries on an arm64 Mac, but as there are nearly no information on how to do that, and it seems that there are a lot of dependency issues (mainly related with Rust).

I am still investigating on what can be done, now I am trying to force all the toolchain to run in Rosetta 2 environment so I can build a x86_64 binary out.

I will keep the progress updated here.

[Cubik65536]