The current buildroot was forked from Chromium many years ago. Due to different project priorities, a lot of features were tacked on in an entirely ad-hoc fashion. Changing project priorities and the lack of a clear owner has left a lot of unused cruft in the source tree.

For instance, there are definitions for platforms that don’t exist (fnl), or, have no users in the engine source tree (cros). Many toolchain definitions reference toolchains that don’t exist at all (GCC toolchains and many of the toolchains for architectures that we don’t target). There are also tools and templates for features that we no longer use (like preparing APKs in the source tree). Many unused python and shell utilities reference Chromium infrastructure.

Many of the features we want to add support for are not fully implemented and the existing definitions cause confusion. This includes adding support for sanitizers or supporting custom toolchains and sysroots. This technical debt is currently limiting development velocity and developer productivity.

The Flutter engine is a relatively simple project that would be better served with a simpler buildroot. I propose we write one from scratch.