I recently looked into how to enterprise-deploy chromium on large
scale networks and how to best fiddle with chromium's
master_preferences (initial_preferences, see #992178) -> user
Preferences dealings and the Chromium's policy system.

Chromium does not seem to be very admin friendly regarding overriding
upstream/distro-maintained initial preferences (i.e. the
master_preferences file). A site admin can only deploy Debian's
chromium by fiddling with the distro version of
/etc/chromium/master_preferences (i.e. by hand or by script or by some
config management tool).

So, I (as a site-admin) cannot provision/modify Chromium's first-run
preferences by dropping some package file to some location and let my
master_preferences file override the distro maintainer's
master_preferences file. Instead I need to fiddle with chromium'
s /etc/chromium/master_preferences conffile. As I prefer rolling out
changes via extra DEB packages rather then tinkering with sensible
config defaults, I see scope for improvement here.

(And yes, I have tried out Chromium's recommended policies, but
settings in master_preferences after having been copied over to
~/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences always take precendence over
recommended policies. Recommended policies get ignored for settings
already pre-configured via master_preferences.

My suggesting now for Debian's chromium is:

   * Read distro-config from /usr/share/chromium/master_preferences
(or .../initial_preferences, see #992178)
   * Allow admin to place a file into /etc/chromium/master_preferences
(or /etc/chromium/initial_preferences, see #992178 again)

If upstream gets involved with this, one could even consider:

   * Read upstream config from /usr/share/chromium/master_preferences
(or .../initial_preferences, see #992178)
   * Merge-in distro config from /etc/chromium/master_preferences (or
.../initial_preferences, see #992178)
   * Additionally merge in site-admin's individual JSON files from
/etc/chromium/initial_preferences.d/ in alphanumerical order

Thanks for maintaining chromium and for your time reading this!

Mike