Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop, by Radley Balko

Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Copyright:	2013
ISBN:	1-61039-212-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	336

As the United States tries, in fits and starts, to have a meaningful discussion about long-standing police racism, brutality, overreach, corruption, and murder, I've realized that my theoretical understanding of the history of and alternative frameworks for law enforcement is woefully lacking. Starting with a book by a conservative white guy is not the most ideal of approaches, but it's what I already had on hand, and it won't be the last book I read and review on this topic. (Most of my research so far has been in podcast form. I don't review those here, but I can recommend Ezra Klein's interviews with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Paul Butler, and, most strongly, sujatha baliga.) Rise of the Warrior Cop is from 2013 and has had several moments of fame, no doubt helped by Balko's connections to the conservative and libertarian right. One of the frustrating facts of US politics is that critiques of the justice system from the right (and from white men) get more media attention than critiques from the left. That said, it's a generally well-respected book on the factual history of the topic, and police brutality and civil rights are among the points on which I have stopped-clock agreements with US libertarians. This book is very, very libertarian. In my callow youth, I was an ardent libertarian, so I've read a lot of US libertarian literature. It's a genre with its own conventions that become obvious when you read enough of it, and Rise of the Warrior Cop goes through them like a checklist. Use the Roman Republic (never the Roman Empire) as the starting point for any political discussion, check. Analyze the topic in the context of pre-revolutionary America, check. Spend considerable effort on discerning the opinions of the US founders on the topic since their opinions are always relevant to the modern world, check. Locate some point in the past (preferably before 1960) where the political issue was as good as it has ever been, check. Frame all changes since then as an erosion of rights through government overreach, check. Present your solution as a return to a previous era of respect for civil rights, check. Once you start recognizing the genre conventions, their prevalence in libertarian writing is almost comical. The framing chapters therefore leave a bit to be desired, but the meat of the book is a useful resource. Starting with the 1970s and its use as a campaigning tool by Nixon, Balko traces a useful history of the war on drugs. And starting with the 1980s, the number of cites to primary sources and the evidence of Balko's own research increases considerably. If you want to know how US police turned into military cosplayers with body armor, heavy weapons, and armored vehicles, this book provides a lot of context and history. One of the reasons why I view libertarians as allies of convenience on this specific issue is that drug legalization and disgust with the war on drugs have been libertarian issues for decades. Ideologically honest libertarians (and Balko appears to be one) are inherently skeptical of the police, so when the police overreach in an area of libertarian interest, they notice. Balko makes a solid argument, backed up with statistics, specific programs, legislation, and court cases, that the drug war and its accompanying lies about heavily-armed drug dealers and their supposed threat to police officers was the fuel for the growth of SWAT teams, no-knock search warrants, erosion of legal protections for criminal defendants, and de facto license for the police to ignore the scope and sometimes even the existence of warrants. This book is useful support for the argument that fears for the safety of officers underlying the militarization of police forces are imaginary. One telling point that Balko makes repeatedly and backs with statistical and anecdotal evidence is that the police generally do not use raid tactics on dangerous criminals. On the contrary, aggressive raids are more likely to be used on the least dangerous criminals because they're faster, they're fun for the police (they provide an adrenaline high and let them play with toys), and they're essentially risk-free. If the police believe someone is truly dangerous, they're more likely to use careful surveillance and to conduct a quiet arrest at an unexpected moment. The middle-of-the-night armed break-ins with battering rams, tear gas, and flash-bangs are, tellingly, used against the less dangerous suspects. This is part of Balko's overall argument that police equipment and tactics have become untethered from any realistic threat and have become cultural. He traces an acceleration of that trend to 9/11 and the resulting obsession with terrorism, which further opened the spigot of military hardware and "special forces" training. This became a point of competition between police departments, with small town forces that had never seen a terrorist and had almost no chance of a terrorist incident demanding their own armored vehicles. I've encountered this bizarre terrorism justification personally; one of the reasons my local police department gave in a public hearing for not having a policy against shooting at moving vehicles was "but what if terrorism?" I don't believe there has ever been a local terrorist attack. SWAT in such places didn't involve the special training or dedicated personnel of large city forces; instead, it was a part-time duty for normal police officers, and frequently they were encouraged to practice SWAT tactics by using them at random for some otherwise normal arrest or search. Balko argues that those raids were more exciting than normal police work, leading to a flood of volunteers for that duty and a tendency to use them as much as possible. That in turn normalizes disconnecting police tactics from the underlying crime or situational risk. So far, so good. But despite the information I was able to extract from it, I have mixed feelings about Rise of the Warrior Cop as a whole. At the least, it has substantial limitations. First, I don't trust the historical survey of policing in this book. Libertarian writing makes for bad history. The constraints of the genre require overusing only a few points of reference, treating every opinion of the US founders as holy writ, and tying forward progress to a return to a previous era, all of which interfere with good analysis. Balko also didn't do the research for the historical survey, as is clear from the footnotes. The citations are all to other people's histories, not to primary sources. He's summarizing other people's histories, and you'll almost certainly get better history by finding well-respected historians who cover the same ground. (That said, if you're not familiar with Peel's policing principles, this is a good introduction.) Second, and this too is unfortunately predictable in a libertarian treatment, race rarely appears in this book. If Balko published the same book today, I'm sure he would say more about race, but even in 2013 its absence is strange. I was struck while reading by how many examples of excessive police force were raids on west coast pot farms; yes, I'm sure that was traumatic, but it's not the demographic I would name as the most vulnerable to or affected by police brutality. West coast pot growers are, however, mostly white. I have no idea why Balko made that choice. Perhaps he thought his target audience would be more persuaded by his argument if he focused on white victims. Perhaps he thought it was an easier and less complicated story to tell. Perhaps, like a lot of libertarians, he doesn't believe racism has a significant impact on society because it would be a market failure. Perhaps those were the people who more readily came to mind. But to talk about police militarization, denial of civil rights, and police brutality in the United States without putting race at the center of both the history and the societal effects leaves a gaping hole in the analysis. Given that lack of engagement, I also am dubious of Balko's policy prescriptions. His reform suggestions aren't unreasonable, but they stay firmly in the centrist and incrementalist camp and would benefit white people more than black people. Transparency, accountability, and cultural changes are all fine and good, but the cultural change Balko is focused on is less aggressive arrest tactics, more use of mediation, and better physical fitness. I would not object to those things (well, maybe the last, which seemed odd), but we need to have a discussion about police white supremacist organizations, the prevalence of spousal abuse, and the police tendency to see themselves not as public servants but as embattled warriors who are misunderstood by the naive sheep they are defending. And, of course, you won't find in Rise of the Warrior Cop any thoughtful wrestling with whether there are alternative approaches to community safety, whether punitive rather than restorative justice is effective, or whether crime is a symptom of deeper societal problems we could address but refuse to. The most radical suggestion Balko has is to legalize drugs, which is both the predictable libertarian position and, as we have seen from recent events in the United States, far from the only problem of overcriminalization. I understand why this book is so frequently mentioned on-line, and its author's political views may make it more palatable to some people than a more race-centered or radical perspective. But I don't think this is the best or most useful book on police violence that one could read today. I hope to find a better one in upcoming reviews. Rating: 6 out of 10

When did I start writing Free Software, now called Open Source? That s a tricky question. Does the time start with the first file edited, the first time it compiles or perhaps even some proto-program you use to work out a concept for the real program formed later on. So using the date you start writing, especially in a era before decent version control systems, is problematic. That is why I use the date of the first release of the first package as the start date. For me, that was Monday 24th July 1995. axdigi and before My first released Free Software program was axdigi which was a layer-2 packet repeater for hamradio. This was uploaded to some FTP server, probably UCSD in late July 1995. The README is dated 24th July 1995. There were programs before this. I had written a closed-source (probably undistributable) driver for the Gracilis PackeTwin serial card and also some sort of primitive wireshark/tcpdump thing for capturing packet radio. Funny thing is that the capture program is the predecessor of both axdigi and a system that was used by a major Australian ISP for their internet billing system. Choosing Free Software So you have written something you think others might like, what software license will you use to distribute it? In 1995 it wasn t that clear. This was the era of strange boutique licenses including ones where it was ok to run the program as a hamradio operator but not a CB radio operator (or at least they tried to work it that way). A friend of mine and the author of the Linux HAM HOWTO amongst other documents, Terry Dawson, suggested I use GPL or another Free Software license. He explained what this Free Software thing was and said that if you want your program to be the most useful then something like GPL will do it. So I released axdigi under the GPL license and most of my programs since then have used the same license. Something like MIT or BSD licenses would have been fine too, I was just not going to use something closed or hand-crafted. That was a while ago, I ve written or maintained many programs since then. I also became a Debian maintainer (23 years so far) and adopted both procps and psmisc which I still maintain as both the Debian developer and upstream to this day. What Next? So it has been 25 years or a quarter of a century, what will happen next? Probably more of the same, though I m not sure I will be maintaining Free Software by the end of the next 25 years (I ll be over 70 then). Perhaps the singularity will arrive and writing software will be something people only do at Rennie Festivals. Come to the Festival! There is someone making horseshoes! Other there is a steam engine. See this other guy writing computer programs on a thing called keyboard!

A new minor release of the anytime package arrived on CRAN overnight. This is the nineteenth release, and it comes just over six months after the previous release giving further indicating that we appear to have reached a nice level of stability. anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, format to either POSIXct or Date objects and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples. This release mostly plays games with CRAN. Given the lack of specification for setups on their end, reproducing test failures remains, to put it mildly, somewhat challenging . So we eventually gave up and weaponed up once more and now explicitly test for the one distribution where tests failed (when they clearly passed everywhere else). With that we now have three new logical predicates for various Linux distribution flavours, and if that dreaded one is seen in one test file the test is skipped. And with that we now score twelve out of twelve OKs. This being a game of cat and mouse, I am sure someone somewhere will soon invent a new test The full list of changes follows.

Changes in anytime version 0.3.8 (2020-07-23)

A small utility function was added to detect the Linux distribution used in order to fine-tune tests once more.

Travis now uses Ubuntu 'bionic' and R 4.0.*.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More information is on the anytime page. The issue tracker tracker off the GitHub repo can be use for questions and comments. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

At DebConf 17 in Montreal, I gave a talk about Ayatana Indicators [1] and the project's goal to continue the by then already dropped out of maintenance Ubuntu Indicators in a separate upstream project, detached from Ubuntu and its Ubuntu'isms. Stalling The whole Ayatana Indicators project received a bit of a show stopper by the fact that the IDO (Indicator Display Object) rendering was not working in vanilla GTK-3 without a certain patch [2] that only Ubuntu has in their GTK-3 package. Addressing GTK developers upstream some years back (after GTK 3.22 had already gone into long term maintenance mode) and asking for a late patch acceptance did not work out (as already assumed). Ayatana Indicators stalled at a level of 90% actually working fine, but those nice and shiny special widgets, like the calendar widget, the audio volume slider widgets, switch widgets, etc. could not be rendered appropriately in GTK based desktop environments (e.g. via MATE Indicator Applet) on other distros than Ubuntu. I never really had the guts to sit down without a defined ending and find a patch / solution to this nasty problem. Ayatana Indicators stalled as a whole. I kept it alive and defended its code base against various GLib and what-not deprecations and kept it in Debian, but the software was actually partially broken / dysfunctional. Taking the Dog for a Walk and then It Became all Light+Love Several days back, I received a mail from Robert Tari [3]. I was outside on a hike with our dog and thought, ah well, let's check emails... I couldn't believe what I read then, 15 seconds later. I could in fact, hardly breathe... I have known Robert from earlier email exchanges. Robert maintains various "little" upstream projects, like e.g. Caja Rename, Odio, Unity Mail, etc. that I have looked into earlier regarding Debian packaging. Robert is also a Manjaro contributor and he has been working on bringing Ayatana Indicators to Manjaro MATE. In the early days, without knowing Robert, I even forked one of his projects (indicator-notification) and turned it into an Ayatana Indicator. Robert and I also exchanged some emails about Ayatana Indicators already a couple of weeks ago. I got the sense of him maybe being up to something already then. Oh, yeah!!! It turned out that Robert and I share the same "love" for the Ubuntu Indicators concept [4]. From his email, it became clear that Robert had spent the last 1-2 weeks drowned in the Ayatana IDO and libayatana-indicator code and worked him self through the bowels of it in order to understand the code concept of Indicators to its very depth. When emerging back from his journey, he presented me (or rather: the world) a patch [5] against libayatana-indicator that makes it possible to render IDO objects even if a vanilla GTK-3 is installed on the system. This patch is a game changer for Indicator lovers. When Robert sent me his mail pointing me to this patch, I think, over the past five years, I have never felt more excited (except from the exact moment of getting married to my wife two-to-three years ago) than during that moment when my brain tried to process his email. "Like a kid on Christmas Eve...", Robert wrote in one of his later mails to me. Indeed, like a "kid on Christmas Eve", Robert. Try It Out As a proof of all this to the Debian people, I have just done the first release of ayatana-indicator-datetime and uploaded it to Debian's NEW queue. Robert is doing the same for Manjaro. The Ayatana Indicator Sound will follow after my vacation. For fancy widget rendering in Ayatana Indicator's system indicators, make sure you have libayatana-indicator 0.7.0 or newer installed on your system. Credits One of the biggest thanks ever I send herewith to Robert Tari! Robert is now co-maintainer of Ayatana Indicators. Welcome! Now, there is finally a team of active contributors. This is so delightful!!! References

P.S. Expect more Ayatana Indicators to appear in your favourite distro soon...

In my recent post about building and publishing documentation for Ansible Collections, I've mentioned that the Ansible Community is currently in the process of making their build tools available as a separate project called antsibull instead of keeping them in the hacking directory of ansible.git. I've also said that I couldn't get the documentation to build with antsibull-docs as it wouldn't support collections yet. Thankfully, Felix Fontein, one of the maintainers of antsibull, pointed out that I was wrong and later versions of antsibull actually have partial collections support. So I went ahead and tried it again. And what should I say? Two bug reports by me and four patches by Felix Fontain later I can use antsibull-docs to generate the Foreman Ansible Modules documentation! Let's see what's needed instead of the ugly hack in detail. We obviously don't need to clone ansible.git anymore and install its requirements manually. Instead we can just install antsibull (0.17.0 contains all the above patches). We also need Ansible (or ansible-base) 2.10 or never, which currently only exists as a pre-release. 2.10 is the first version that has an ansible-doc that can list contents of a collection, which antsibull-docs requires to work properly. The current implementation of collections documentation in antsibull-docs requires the collection to be installed as in "Ansible can find it". We had the same requirement before to find the documentation fragments and can just re-use the installation we do for various other build tasks in build/collection and point at it using the ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATHS environment variable or the collections_paths setting in ansible.cfg¹. After that, it's only a matter of passing --use-current to make it pick up installed collections instead of trying to fetch and parse them itself. Given the main goal of antisibull-docs collection is to build documentation for multiple collections at once, it defaults to place the generated files into <dest-dir>/collections/<namespace>/<collection>. However, we only build documentation for one collection and thus pass --squash-hierarchy to avoid this longish path and make it generate documentation directly in <dest-dir>. Thanks to Felix for implementing this feature for us! And that's it! We can generate our documentation with a single line now!

antsibull-docs collection --use-current --squash-hierarchy --dest-dir ./build/plugin_docs theforeman.foreman

The PR to switch to antsibull is open for review and I hope to get merged in soon! Oh and you know what's cool? The documentation is now also available as a preview on ansible.com!

Yes, the paths version of that setting is deprecated in 2.10, but as we support older Ansible versions, we still use it.

Marks and mark rings in GNU Emacs I recently attempted to answer the question of whether experienced Emacs users should consider partially or fully disabling Transient Mark mode, which is (and should be) the default in modern GNU Emacs. That blog post was meant to be as information-dense as I could make it, but now I d like to describe the experience I have been having after switching to my custom pseudo-Transient Mark mode, which is labelled mitigation #2 in my older post. In summary: I feel like I ve uncovered a whole editing paradigm lying just beneath the surface of the editor I ve already been using for years. That is cool and enjoyable in itself, but I think it s also helped me understand other design decisions about the basics of the Emacs UI better than before in particular, the ideas behind how Emacs chooses where to display buffers, which were very frustrating to me in the past. I am now regularly using relatively obscure commands like C-x 4 C-o. I see it! It all makes sense now! I would encourage everyone who has never used Emacs without Transient Mark mode to try turning it off for a while, either fully or partially, just to see what you can learn. It s fascinating how it can come to seem more convenient and natural to pop the mark just to go back to the end of the current line after fixing up something earlier in the line, even though doing so requires pressing two modified keys instead of just C-e. Eshell I was amused to learn some years ago that someone was trying to make Emacs work as an X11 window manager. I was amazed and impressed to learn, more recently, that the project is still going and a fair number of people are using it. Kudos! I suspect that the basic motivation for such projects is that Emacs is a virtual Lisp machine, and it has a certain way of managing visible windows, and people would like to be able to bring both of those to their X11 window management. However, I am beginning to suspect that the intrinsic properties of Emacs buffers are tightly connected to the ways in which Emacs manages visible windows, and the intrinsic properties of Emacs buffers are at least as fundamental as its status as a virtual Lisp machine. Thus I am not convinced by the idea of trying to use Emacs ways of handling visible windows to handle windows which do not contain Emacs buffers. (but it s certainly nice to learn it s working out for others) The more general point is this. Emacs buffers are as fundamental to Emacs as anything else is, so it seems unlikely to be particularly fruitful to move something typically done outside of Emacs into Emacs, unless that activity fits naturally into an Emacs buffer or buffers. Being suited to run on a virtual Lisp machine is not enough. What could be more suited to an Emacs buffer, however, than a typical Unix command shell session? By this I mean things like running commands which produce text output, and piping this output between commands and into and out of files. Typically the commands one enters are sort of like tiny programs in themselves, even if there are no pipes involved, because you have to spend time determining just what options to pass to achieve what you want. It is great to have all your input and output available as ordinary buffer text, navigable just like all your other Emacs buffers. Full screen text user interfaces, like top(1), are not the sort of thing I have in mind here. These are suited to terminal emulators, and an Emacs buffer makes a poor terminal emulator what you end up with is a sort of terminal emulator emulator. Emacs buffers and terminal emulators are just different things. These sorts of thoughts lead one to Eshell, the Emacs Shell. Quoting from its documentation:

The shell s role is to make [system] functionality accessible to the user in an unformed state. Very roughly, it associates kernel functionality with textual commands, allowing the user to interact with the operating system via linguistic constructs. Process invocation is perhaps the most significant form this takes, using the kernel s fork' andexec functions. Emacs is a user application, but it does make the functionality of the kernel accessible through an interpreted language namely, Lisp. For that reason, there is little preventing Emacs from serving the same role as a modern shell. It too can manipulate the kernel in an unpredetermined way to cause system changes. All it s missing is the shell-ish linguistic model.

Eshell has been working very well for me for the past month or so, for, at least, Debian packaging work, which is very command shell-oriented (think tools like dch(1)). The other respects in which Eshell is tightly integrated with the rest of Emacs are icing on the cake. In particular, Eshell can transparently operate on remote hosts, using TRAMP. So when I need to execute commands on Debian s ftp-master server to process package removal requests, I just

cd
/ssh:fasolo:

in Eshell. Emacs takes care of disconnecting and connecting to the server when needed there is no need to maintain a fragile SSH connection and a shell process (or anything else) running on the remote end. Or I can cd /ssh:athena\ sudo:root@athena: to run commands as root on the webserver hosting this blog, and, again, the text of the session survives on my laptop, and may be continued at my leisure, no matter whether athena reboots, or I shut my laptop and open it up again the next morning. And of course you can easily edit files on the remote host.

A little under two months ago I invested in an expensive ergonomic keyboard, a Kinesis Advantage 2, and set about figuring out how to use it most effectively with Emacs. The default layout for the keyboard is great for strong typists who control their computer mostly with their mouse, but less good for Emacs users, who are strong typists that control their computer mostly with their keyboard. It took me several tries to figure out where to put the ctrl, alt, backspace, delete, return and spacebar keys, and aside from one forum post I ran into, I haven t found anyone online who came up with anything much like what I ve come up with, so I thought I should probably write up a blog post. The mappings

The pairs of arrow keys under the first two fingers of each hand become ctrl and alt/meta keys. This way there is a ctrl and alt/meta key for each hand, to reduce the need for one-handed chording. I bought the keyboard expecting to have all modifier keys on my thumbs. However, (i) only the two large thumb keys can be pressed without lifting your hand away from the home row, or stretching in a way that s not healthy; and (ii) only the outermost large thumb key can be comfortably held down as a modifier. It takes a little work to get used to using the third and fifth fingers of one hand to hold down both alt/meta and shift, for typing core Emacs commands like M-^ and M-@, but it does become natural to do so.
The arrow keys are moved to the four ctrl/alt/super keys which run along the top of the thumb key areas.
The outermost large thumb key of each hand becomes a spacebar. This means it is easy to type C-u C-SPC with the right hand while the left hand holds down control, and sequences like C-x C-SPC and C-a C-SPC C-e with the left hand with the right hand holding down control. It took me a while to realise that it is not wasteful to have two spacebars.
The inner large thumb keys become backspace and return.
The international key becomes delete. Rarely needed for Emacs users, as we have C-d, so initially I just had no delete key, but soon came to regret this when trying to edit text in web forms.
Caps Lock becomes Super, but remains caps lock on the keypad layer. See my rebindings for ordinary keyboards for some discussion of having just a single Super key.

Sequences of two modified keys on different halves of the keyboard It is desirable to input sequences like C-x C-o without switching which hand is holding the control key. This requires one-handed chording, but this is trecherous when the modifier keys not under the thumbs, because you might need to press the modified key with the same finger that s holding the modifier! Fortunately, most or all sequences of two keys modified by ctrl or alt/meta, where each of the two modifier keys is typed by a different hand, begin with C-c, C-x or M-g, and the left hand can handle each of these on its own. This leaves the right hand completely free to hit the second modified key while the left hand continues to hold down the modifier. My rebindings for ordinary keyboards I have some rebindings to make Emacs usage more ergonomic on an ordinary keyboard. So far, my Kinesis Advantage setup is close enough to that setup that I m not having difficulty switching back and forth from my laptop keyboard. The main difference is for sequences of two modified keys on different halves of the keyboard which of the two modified keys is easiest to type as a one-handed chord is different on the Kinesis Advantage than on my laptop keyboard. At this point, I m executing these sequences without any special thought, and they re rare enough that I don t think I need to try to determine what would be the most ergonomic way to handle them.

Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In June, 202.00 work hours have been dispatched among 12 paid contributors. Their reports are available:

Abhijith PA did 8h (out of 14h assigned), thus carrying over 6h to July.
Ben Hutchings did 20h (out of 20h assigned).
Brian May did 10h (out of 10h assigned).
Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 4h from his backlog of 58.25h from May, thus carrying over 54.25h to July.
Markus Koschany did 60h (out of 48.25h backlog from May and 11.75h extra hours manually assigned).
Mike Gabriel did 8h (out of 8h assigned).
Ola Lundqvist did 12.5h (out of 12h assigned and 7.5h from May), thus carrying over 7h to July.
Roberto C. S nchez did 28.75h (out of 30h assigned), thus carrying over 1.25h to July.
Sylvain Beucler did 30h (out of 30h assigned).
Thorsten Alteholz did 30h (out of 30h assigned).
Utkarsh Gupta did 30h (out of 30h assigned).

Evolution of the situation June was the last month of Jessie LTS which ended on 2020-06-20. If you still need to run Jessie somewhere, please read the post about keeping Debian 8 Jessie alive for longer than 5 years.
So, as (Jessie) LTS is dead, long live the new LTS, Stretch LTS! Stretch has received its last point release, so regular LTS operations can now continue.
Accompanying this, for the first time, we have prepared a small survey about our users and contributors, who they are and why they are using LTS. Filling out the survey should take less than 10 minutes. We would really appreciate if you could participate in the survey online! On July 27th 2020 we will close the survey, so please don t hesitate and participate now! After that, there will be a followup with the results. The security tracker for Stretch LTS currently lists 29 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 44 packages needing an update in Stretch LTS. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold. We welcome CoreFiling this month!

Platinum sponsors:

TOSHIBA (for 58 months)
GitHub (for 48 months)
Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 26 months)

Gold sponsors:

Blablacar (for 73 months)
Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 69 months)
Linode (for 63 months)
Babiel GmbH (for 52 months)
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Silver sponsors:

The Positive Internet Company (for 74 months)
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Bronze sponsors:

Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 74 months)
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Joys of sshfs slave mode. When I want to have parts of my source tree on remote, I use sshfs slave mode, combined with emacs tramp things look very much integrated. sshfs interface only has obnoxious -o slave option which makes it talk to stdin/stdout, which needs to be connected to sftp-server from the local host. Using dpipe from vde2 seems to be a popular method to run the tool. Something like: dpipe /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server = ssh hostname sshfs :/directory/to/be/shared ~/mnt/src -o slave I wish I can limit the visibility from sftp-server but maybe that's okay.

I had a draft of this article for about two months, but never really managed to polish and finalize it, partially due to some nasty hacks needed down the road. Thankfully, one of my wishes was heard and I had now the chance to revisit the post and try a few things out. Sadly, my wish was granted only partially and the result is still not beautiful, but read yourself ;-) UPDATE: I've published a follow up post on building documentation for Ansible Collections using antsibull, as my wish was now fully granted. As part of my day job, I am maintaining the Foreman Ansible Modules - a collection of modules to interact with Foreman and its plugins (most notably Katello). We've been maintaining this collection (as in set of modules) since 2017, so much longer than collections (as in Ansible Collections) existed, but the introduction of Ansible Collections allowed us to provide a much easier and supported way to distribute the modules to our users. Now users usually want two things: features and documentation. Features are easy, we already have plenty of them. But documentation was a bit cumbersome: we had documentation inside the modules, so you could read it via ansible-doc on the command line if you had the collection installed, but we wanted to provide online readable and versioned documentation too - something the users are used to from the official Ansible documentation. Building HTML from Ansible modules Ansible modules contain documentation in form of YAML blocks documenting the parameters, examples and return values of the module. The Ansible documentation site is built using Sphinx from reStructuredText. As the modules don't contain reStructuredText, Ansible ~~has~~had a tool to generate it from the documentation YAML: build-ansible.py document-plugins. The tool and the accompanying libraries are not part of the Ansible distribution - they just live in the hacking directory. To run them we need a git checkout of Ansible and source hacking/env-setup to set PYTHONPATH and a few other variables correctly for Ansible to run directly from that checkout. ~~It would be nice if that'd be a feature of ansible-doc, but while it isn't, we need to have a full Ansible git checkout to be able to continue.~~The tool has been recently split out into an own repository/distribution: antsibull. However it was also a bit redesigned to be easier to use (good!), and my hack to abuse it to build documentation for out-of-tree modules doesn't work anymore (bad!). There is an issue open for collections support, so I hope to be able to switch to antsibull soon. Anyways, back to the original hack. As we're using documentation fragments, we need to tell the tool to look for these, because otherwise we'd get errors about not found fragments. We're passing ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATHS so that the tool can find the correct, namespaced documentation fragments there. We also need to provide --module-dir pointing at the actual modules we want to build documentation for.

ANSIBLEGIT=/path/to/ansible.git
source $ ANSIBLEGIT /hacking/env-setup
ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATHS=../build/collections python3 $ ANSIBLEGIT /hacking/build-ansible.py document-plugins --module-dir ../plugins/modules --template-dir ./_templates --template-dir $ ANSIBLEGIT /docs/templates --type rst --output-dir ./modules/

Ideally, when antsibull supports collections, this will become antsibull-docs collection without any need to have an Ansible checkout, sourcing env-setup or pass tons of paths. Until then we have a Makefile that clones Ansible, runs the above command and then calls Sphinx (which provides a nice Makefile for building) to generate HTML from the reStructuredText. You can find our slightly modified templates and themes in our git repository in the docs directory. Publishing HTML documentation for Ansible Modules Now that we have a way to build the documentation, let's also automate publishing, because nothing is worse than out-of-date documentation! We're using GitHub and GitHub Actions for that, but you can achieve the same with GitLab, TravisCI or Jenkins. First, we need a trigger. As we want always up-to-date documentation for the main branch where all the development happens and also documentation for all stable releases that are tagged (we use vX.Y.Z for the tags), we can do something like this:

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - v[0-9]+.[0-9]+.[0-9]+
    branches:
      - master

Now that we have a trigger, we define the job steps that get executed:

    steps:
      - name: Check out the code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v2
        with:
          python-version: "3.7"
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: make doc-setup
      - name: Build docs
        run: make doc

At this point we will have the docs built by make doc in the docs/_build/html directory, but not published anywhere yet. As we're using GitHub anyways, we can also use GitHub Pages to host the result.

      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: configure git
        run:  
          git config user.name "$ GITHUB_ACTOR "
          git config user.email "$ GITHUB_ACTOR @bots.github.com"
          git fetch --no-tags --prune --depth=1 origin +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v2
        with:
          python-version: "3.7"
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: make doc-setup
      - name: Build docs
        run: make doc
      - name: commit docs
        run:  
          git checkout gh-pages
          rm -rf $(basename $ GITHUB_REF )
          mv docs/_build/html $(basename $ GITHUB_REF )
          dirname */index.html   sort --version-sort   xargs -I@@ -n1 echo '<div><a href="@@/"><p>@@</p></a></div>' >> index.html
          git add $(basename $ GITHUB_REF ) index.html
          git commit -m "update docs for $(basename $ GITHUB_REF )"   true
      - name: push docs
        run: git push origin gh-pages

As this is not exactly self explanatory:

Configure git to have a proper author name and email, as otherwise you get ugly history and maybe even failing commits
Fetch all branch names, as the checkout action by default doesn't do this.
Setup Python, Sphinx, Ansible etc.
Build the documentation as described above.
Switch to the gh-pages branch from the commit that triggered the workflow.
Remove any existing documentation for this tag/branch ($GITHUB_REF contains the name which triggered the workflow) if it exists already.
Move the previously built documentation from the Sphinx output directory to a directory named after the current target.
Generate a simple index of all available documentation versions.
Commit all changes, but don't fail if there is nothing to commit.
Push to the gh-pages branch which will trigger a GitHub Pages deployment.

Pretty sure this won't win any beauty contest for scripting and automation, but it gets the job done and nobody on the team has to remember to update the documentation anymore. You can see the results on theforeman.org or directly on GitHub.

Sorry for not being on blog for sometime, the last few months have been brutal. While I am externally ok, because of the lockdown I sensed major hearing loss. First, I thought it may be a hallucination or something but as it persisted for days, I got myself checked and found out that I got 80% hearing loss in my right ear. How and why I don t know. Is this NIHL or some other kind of hearing loss is yet to be ascertained. I do live what is and used to be one of the busiest roads in the city, now for last few months not so much. On top of it, you have various other noises.

Tinnitus I also experienced Tinnitus which again I perceived to be a hallucination but found it s not. I have no clue if my eiplepsy has anything to do with hearing loss or both are different. I did discover that while today we know that something like Tinnitus exists, just 10-15 years back, people might mistake it for madness. In a way it is madness because you are constantly hearing sound, music etc. 24 7 , that is enough to drive anybody mad. During this brief period, did learn what an Otoscope is . I did get audiometry tests done but need to get at least a second or if possible also a third opinion but those will have to wait as the audio clinics are about 8-10 kms. away. In the open-close-open-close environment just makes it impossible to figure out the time, date and get it done. After that is done then probably get a hearing device, probably a Siemens Signia hearing aid. The hearing aids are damn expensive, almost 50k per piece and they probably have a lifetime of about 5-6 years, so it s a bit of a expensive proposition. I also need a second or/and third opinion on the audiometry profile so I know things are correct. All of these things are gonna take time.

Pandemic Situation in India and Testing Coincidentally, was talking to couple of people about this. It is sad to see that we have the third highest number of covid cases at 1/10th the tests we are doing vis-a-vis U.S.A. According to statistical site ourworldindata , we seem to be testing 0.22 per thousand people compared to 2.28 people per thousand done by United States. Sadly it doesn t give the breakup of the tests, from what I read the PCR tests are better than the antibody tests, a primer shares the difference between the two tests. IIRC, the antibody tests are far cheaper than the swab tests but swab tests are far more accurate as it looks for the virus s genetic material (RNA) . Anyways coming to the numbers, U.S. has a population of roughly 35 crores taking a little bit liberty from numbers given at popclock . India meanwhile has 135 crore or almost four times the population of U.S. and the amount of testing done is 1/10th as shared above. Just goes to share where the GOI priorities lie . We are running out of beds, ventilators and whatever else there is. Whatever resources are there are being used for covid patients and they are being charged a bomb. I have couple of hospitals near my place and the cost of a bed in an isolation ward is upward of INR 100k and if you need a ventilator then add another 50k . And in moment of rarity, the differences between charges of private and public are zero. Meaning there is immense profiteering happening it seems in the medical world. Heck, even the Govt. is on the act where they are charging 18% GST on sanitizers. If this is not looting then I dunno what is.
Example of Medical Bills people have to pay.

China, Nepal & Diplomacy While everybody today knows how China has intruded and captured quite a part of Ladakh, this wasn t the case when they started in April. That time Ajai Shukla had shared this with the top defence personnel but nothing came of it. Then on May 30th he broke/shared the news with the rest of the world and was immediately branded anti-national, person on Chinese payroll and what not. This is when he and Pravin Sawnhey of Force Magazine had both been warning of the same from last year itself. Pravin, has a youtube channel and had been warning India against Chinese intentions from 2015 and even before that. He had warned repeatedly that our obsession with the Pakistan border meant that we were taking eyes of the border with China which spans almost 2300 odd kms. going all the way to Arunachal Pradesh. A good map which shows the conflict can be found at dw.com which I am sharing/reproducing below

India-China Border Areas Copyright DW.com 2020
Note:- I am sharing a neutral party s rendering of the border disputes or somebody who doesn t have much at stake as the two countries have so that things could be looked at little objectively. The Prime Minister on the other hand, made the comment which made galvanising a made-up word into verb . It means to go without coming in. In fact, several news sites shared the statement told by the Prime Minister and the majority of people were shocked. In fact, there had been reports that he gave the current CDS, General Rawat, a person of his own choosing, a peace of his mind. But what lead to this confrontation in the first place ? I think many pieces are part of that puzzle, one of the pieces are surely the cutting of defense budget for the last 6 years, Even this year, if you look at the budget slashes done in the earlier part of the year when he shared how HAL had to raise loans from the market to pay salaries of its own people. Later he shared how the Govt. was planning to slash the defence budget. Interestingly, he had also shared some of the reasons which reaffirm that it is the only the Govt. which can solve some of the issues/conundrum

First, it must recognize that our firms competing for global orders are up against rivals that are being supported by their home governments with tax and export incentives and infrastructure that almost invariably surpasses India s. Our government must provide its aerospace firms with a level playing field, if not a competitive advantage. The greatest deterrent to growth our companies face is the high cost of capital and lack of access to funds. In several cases, Indian MSMEs have had to turn down offers to build components and assemblies for global OEM supply chains simply because the cost of capital to create the shop floor and train the personnel was too high. This resulted in a loss of business and a missed opportunity for creating jobs and skills. To overcome this, the government could create a sector specific A&D Fund to provide low cost capital quickly to enable our MSMEs to grab fleeting business opportunities. Ajai Shukla, blogpost 13th March 2020 . And then reporting on 11th May 2020 itself, CDS Gen. Rawat himself commented on saving the budget, they were in poor taste but still he shared what he thought about it. So, at the end of it one part of the story. The other part of the story probably lies in India s relations with its neighbors and lack of numbers in diplomats and diplomacy. So let me cover both the things one by one .

Diplomats, lack of numbers and hence the hands we are dealth with When Mr. Modi started his first term, he used the term Maximum Governance, Minimum Government but sadly cut those places where it indeed needs more people, one of which is diplomacy. A slightly dated 2012 article/opinion shared writes that India needs to engage with the rest of the world and do with higher number. Cut to 2020 and the numbers more or less remain the same . What Mr. Modi tried to do is instead of using diplomats, he tried to use his charm and hugopolicy for lack of a better term. 6 years later, here we are. After 200 trips abroad, not a single trade agreement to show what he done. I could go on but both time and energy are not on my side hence now switching to Nepal

Nepal, once friend, now enemy ? Nepal had been a friend of India for 70 odd years, what changed in the last few years that it changed from friend to enemy ? There had been two incidents in recent memory that changed the status quo. The first is the 2015 Nepal blockade . Now one could argue it either way but the truth is that Nepal understood that it is heavily dependent on India hence as any sovereign country would do in its interest it also started courting China for imports so there is some balance. The second one though is one of our own making. On December 16, 2014 RBI allowed Nepali citizens to have cash upto INR 25,000/- . Then in 2016 when demonetization was announced, they said that people could exchange only upto INR 4,500/- which was far below the limit shared above. And btw, before people start blaming just RBI for the decision, FEMA decisions are taken jointly by the finance ministry (FE) as well as ministry of external affairs (MEA) . So without them knowing the decision could not have been taken when announcing it. The result of lowering of demonetization is what made Nepal move more into Chinese hands and this has been shared by number of people in numerous articles in different websites. The wire interview with the vice-chairman of Niti Ayog is pretty interesting. The argument that Nepal show give an estimate of how much old money is there falls flat when in demonetization itself, it was thought of that around 30-40% was black money and would not be returned but by RBI s own admissions all 99.3% of the money was returned. Perhaps they should have consulted Prof. Arun Kumar of JNU who has extensively written and studied the topic before doing that fool-hardy step. It is the reason that since then, an economy which was searing at 9% has been contracting ever since, I could give a dozen articles stating that, but for the moment, just one will suffice. The slowing economy and the sharp divisions between people based on either outlook, religion or whatever also encouraged China to attack us. This year is not good for India. The only thing I hope Indians and people all over do is just maintain physical distances, masks and somehow survive till middle of next year without getting infected when probably most of the vaccine candidates have been trialed, results are in and we have a ready vaccine. I do hope that at least for once, ICMR shares data even after the vaccine is approved, whichever vaccine. Till later.

By now everyone must have seen the versions of comedy shows with the laugh track edited out. The removal of the laughter doesn't just reveal the artificial nature of television and how it conscripts the viewer into laughing along; by subverting key conversational conventions, it reveals some of the myriad and subtle ways humans communicate with one another:

Although the show's conversation is ostensibly between two people, the viewer serves as a silent third actor through which they and therefore we are meant to laugh along with. Then, when this third character is forcibly muted, viewers not only have to endure the stilted gaps, they also sense an uncanny loss of familiarity by losing their 'own' part in the script. A similar phenomenon can be seen in other art forms. In Garfield Minus Garfield, the forced negative spaces that these pauses introduce are discomfiting, almost to the level of performance art:

But when the technique is applied to other TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory, it is unsettling in entirely different ways, exposing the dysfunctional relationships and the adorkable mysogny at the heart of the show:

Once you start to look for it, the ur-elements of the audience, response and timing in the way we communicate are everywhere, from the gaps we leave so that others instinctively know when you have finished speaking, to the myriad of ways you can edit a film. These components are always present, it is only when one of them is taken away that they become more apparent. Today, the small delays added by videoconferencing adds an uncanny awkwardness to many of our everyday interactions too. It is said that "comedy is tragedy plus timing", so it is unsurprising that Zoom's undermining of timing leads, by this simple calculus of human interactions, to feelings of... tragedy.

Leaving aside the usual comments about Pavlovian conditioning and the shows that are the exceptions, complaints against canned laughter are the domain of the pub bore. I will therefore only add two brief remarks. First, rather than being cynically added to artificially inflate the lack of 'real' comedy, laugh tracks were initially added to replicate the live audience of existing shows. In other words, without a laugh track, these new shows might have ironically appeared almost as eerie as the fan edits cited above are today. Secondly, although laugh tracks are described as "false", this is not entirely correct. After all, someone did actually laugh, even if it was for an entirey different joke. In his Simulacra and Simulation, cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard might have poetically identified canned laughter as a "reflection of a profound reality", rather than an outright falsehood. One day, when this laughter becomes entirely algorithmically generated, Baudrillard would describe it as "an order of sorcery", placing it metaphysically on the same level as the entirely pumpkin-free Pumpkin Spiced Latte.

For a variety of reasons I recently decided to try interacting with various social media platforms in new ways. One way of loosening my addiction to this pornography of the amygdala was to hide the number of replies, 'likes' and related numbers:

The effect of installing this extension was immediate. I caught my eyes darting to where the numbers had been and realised I had been subconsciously looking for the input and perhaps even the outright validation of the masses. To be sure, these numbers can be relevant and sometimes useful, but they do implicitly involve delegating part of your responsibility of thinking for yourself to the vox populi, or the Greek chorus of the 21st century. Like many of you reading this, I am sure I told myself that the number of 'likes' has no bearing on whether I should agree with something, but hiding the numbers reveals much of this might have been a convenient fiction; as an entire century of discoveries in behavioural economics has demonstrated, all the pleasingly-satisfying arguments for rational free-market economics stand no chance against our inherent buggy mammalian brains.

Tying a few things together, when attempting to doomscroll through social media without these numbers, I realised that social media without the scorecard of engagement is almost exactly like watching these shows without the laugh track. Without the number of 'retweets', the lazy prompts to remind you exactly when, how and for how much to respond are removed, and replaced with the same stilted silences of those edited scenes from Friends. At times, the existential loneliness of Garfield Minus Garfield creeps in too, and there is more than enough of the dysfunctional, validation-seeking and parasocial 'conversations' of The Big Bang Theory. Most of all, the whole exercise permits a certain level of detached, critical analysis, allowing one to observe that the platforms often feel like a pre-written script with your 'friends' cast as actors, all perpetuated on the heady fumes of rows INSERT-ed into a database on the other side of the world. I'm not quite sure how this will affect my usage of the platforms, and any time spent away from these sites may mean fewer online connections at a time when we all need them the most. But as the Karal Marling, professor at the University of Minnesota wrote about artificial audiences: "Let me be the laugh track."

Whack-A-Mole machines from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whac-A-Mole_Cedar_Point.jpg>

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi. Now that I have a sysroot, I try to use it to build Qt5 with QtWebEngine. Nothing seems to work straightforwardly with Qt5's build system, and hit an endless series of significant blockers to try and work around.

Problem in wayland code QtWayland's source currently does not compile:

../../../hardwareintegration/client/brcm-egl/qwaylandbrcmeglwindow.cpp: In constructor  QtWaylandClient::QWaylandBrcmEglWindow::QWaylandBrcmEglWindow(QWindow*) :
../../../hardwareintegration/client/brcm-egl/qwaylandbrcmeglwindow.cpp:131:67: error: no matching function for call to  QtWaylandClient::QWaylandWindow::QWaylandWindow(QWindow*&) 
     , m_eventQueue(wl_display_create_queue(mDisplay->wl_display()))
                                                                   ^
In file included from ../../../../include/QtWaylandClient/5.15.0/QtWaylandClient/private/qwaylandwindow_p.h:1,
                 from ../../../hardwareintegration/client/brcm-egl/qwaylandbrcmeglwindow.h:43,
                 from ../../../hardwareintegration/client/brcm-egl/qwaylandbrcmeglwindow.cpp:40:
../../../../include/QtWaylandClient/5.15.0/QtWaylandClient/private/../../../../../src/client/qwaylandwindow_p.h:97:5: note: candidate:  QtWaylandClient::QWaylandWindow::QWaylandWindow(QWindow*, QtWayland
Client::QWaylandDisplay*) 
     QWaylandWindow(QWindow *window, QWaylandDisplay *display);
     ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
../../../../include/QtWaylandClient/5.15.0/QtWaylandClient/private/../../../../../src/client/qwaylandwindow_p.h:97:5: note:   candidate expects 2 arguments, 1 provided
make[5]: Leaving directory '/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qttools/src/qdoc'

I am not trying to debug here. I understand that Wayland support is not a requirement, and I'm adding -skip wayland to Qt5's configure options. Next round. nss not found Qt5 embeds Chrome's sources. Chrome's sources require libnss3-dev to be available for both host and target architectures. Although I now have it installed both on the build system and in the sysroot, the pkg-config wrapper that Qt5 hooks into its Chrome's sources, failes to find it:

Command: /usr/bin/python2 /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py -s /home/build/sysroot/ -a arm -p /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-pkg-config --system_libdir lib nss -v -lssl3
Returned 1.
stderr:
Package nss was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing  nss.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'nss' found
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py", line 248, in <module>
    sys.exit(main())
  File "/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py", line 143, in main
    prefix = GetPkgConfigPrefixToStrip(options, args)
  File "/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py", line 82, in GetPkgConfigPrefixToStrip
    "--variable=prefix"] + args, env=os.environ).decode('utf-8')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 223, in check_output
    raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd, output=output)
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-pkg-config', '--variable=prefix', 'nss']' returned non-zero exit status 1
See //build/config/linux/nss/BUILD.gn:15:3: whence it was called.
  pkg_config("system_nss_no_ssl_config")  
  ^---------------------------------------
See //crypto/BUILD.gn:218:25: which caused the file to be included.
    public_configs += [ "//build/config/linux/nss:system_nss_no_ssl_config" ]
                        ^--------------------------------------------------
Project ERROR: GN run error!

It's trying to look into $SYSROOT/usr/lib/pkgconfig, while it should be $SYSROOT//usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig. I worked around this this patch to qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/linux/pkg-config.py:

--- pkg-config.py.orig  2020-07-16 11:46:21.005373002 +0200
+++ pkg-config.py   2020-07-16 11:46:02.605296967 +0200
@@ -61,6 +61,7 @@
   libdir = sysroot + '/usr/' + options.system_libdir + '/pkgconfig'
   libdir += ':' + sysroot + '/usr/share/pkgconfig'
+  libdir += ':' + sysroot + '/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig'
   os.environ['PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR'] = libdir
   return libdir

Next round. g++ 8.3.0 Internal Compiler Error Qt5's sources embed Chrome's sources that embed the skia library sources. One of the skia library sources, when cross-compiled to ARM with -O1 or -O2 with g++ 8.3.0, produces an Internal Compiler Error:

/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ -MMD -MF obj/skia/skcms/skcms.o.d -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -DCR_SYSROOT_HASH=76e6068f9f6954e2ab1ff98ce5fa236d3d85bcbd -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/include/third_party/skcms -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -w -std=c11 -mfp16-format=ieee -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=hard -mtune=generic-armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mthumb -Wall -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-psabi -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -O2 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -std=gnu++14 -Wno-narrowing -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-attributes -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-subobject-linkage -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-return-type -Wno-deprecated-copy -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti --sysroot=../../../../../../sysroot/ -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -c ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/skcms.cc -o obj/skia/skcms/skcms.o
during RTL pass: expand
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/skcms.cc:2053:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/src/Transform_inl.h: In function  void baseline::exec_ops(const Op*, const void**, const char*, char*, int) :
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/src/Transform_inl.h:766:13: internal compiler error: in convert_move, at expr.c:218
 static void exec_ops(const Op* ops, const void** args,
             ^~~~~~~~
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-8/README.Bugs> for instructions.

I reported the bug at https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=96206 Since this source compiles with -O0, I attempted to fix this by editing qtwebkit/src/3rdparty/chromium/build/config/compiler/BUILD.gn and replacing instances of -O1 and -O2 with -O0. Spoiler: wrong attempt. We'll see it in the next round. Impossible constraint in asm Qt5's sources embed Chrome's sources that embed the ffmpeg library sources. Even if ffmpeg's development libraries are present both in the host and in the target system, the build system insists in compiling and using the bundled version. Unfortunately, using -O0 breaks the build of ffmpeg:

/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc -MMD -MF obj/third_party/ffmpeg/ffmpeg_internal/opus.o.d -DHAVE_AV_CONFIG_H -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112 -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 -DPIC -DFFMPEG_CONFIGURATION=NULL -DCHROMIUM_NO_LOGGING -D_ISOC99_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -DCR_SYSROOT_HASH=76e6068f9f6954e2ab1ff98ce5fa236d3d85bcbd -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -DOPUS_FIXED_POINT -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/chromium/config/Chromium/linux/arm -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/compat/atomics/gcc -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/opus/src/include -fPIC -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fomit-frame-pointer -w -std=c99 -pthread -fno-math-errno -fno-signed-zeros -fno-tree-vectorize -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=hard -mtune=generic-armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mthumb -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -Wno-psabi -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -O0 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -std=gnu11 --sysroot=../../../../../../sysroot/ -c ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus.c -o obj/third_party/ffmpeg/ffmpeg_internal/opus.o
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/intmath.h:30,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/common.h:106,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/avutil.h:296,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/audio_fifo.h:30,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus.h:28,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus_celt.h:29,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus.c:32:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavcodec/opus.c: In function  ff_celt_quant_bands :
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ffmpeg/libavutil/arm/intmath.h:77:5: error: impossible constraint in  asm 
     __asm__ ("usat %0, %2, %1" : "=r"(x) : "r"(a), "i"(p));
     ^~~~~~~

The same source compiles with using -O2 instead of -O0. I worked around this by undoing the previous change, and limiting -O0 to just the source that causes the Internal Compiler Error. I edited qtwebengine/src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/skcms/skcms.cc to prepend:

#pragma GCC push_options
#pragma GCC optimize ("O0")

and append:

#pragma GCC pop_options

Next round. Missing build-deps for i386 code Qt5's sources embed Chrome's sources that embed the V8 library sources. For some reason, torque, that is part of V8, wants to build some of its sources into 32 bit code with -m32, and I did not have i386 cross-compilation libraries installed:

/usr/bin/g++ -MMD -MF v8_snapshot/obj/v8/torque_base/csa-generator.o.d -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -DV8_TYPED_ARRAY_MAX_SIZE_IN_HEAP=64 -DENABLE_MINOR_MC -DV8_INTL_SUPPORT -DV8_CONCURRENT_MARKING -DV8_ENABLE_LAZY_SOURCE_POSITIONS -DV8_EMBEDDED_BUILTINS -DV8_SHARED_RO_HEAP -DV8_WIN64_UNWINDING_INFO -DV8_ENABLE_REGEXP_INTERPRETER_THREADED_DISPATCH -DV8_31BIT_SMIS_ON_64BIT_ARCH -DV8_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS -DV8_TARGET_ARCH_ARM -DCAN_USE_ARMV7_INSTRUCTIONS -DCAN_USE_VFP3_INSTRUCTIONS -DUSE_EABI_HARDFLOAT=1 -DV8_HAVE_TARGET_OS -DV8_TARGET_OS_LINUX -DDISABLE_UNTRUSTED_CODE_MITIGATIONS -DV8_31BIT_SMIS_ON_64BIT_ARCH -DV8_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS -Iv8_snapshot/gen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -I../../3rdparty/chromium/v8 -Iv8_snapshot/gen/v8 -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -m32 -msse2 -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -Wall -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -Wno-strict-overflow -Wno-return-type -O3 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -std=gnu++14 -Wno-narrowing -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-attributes -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-subobject-linkage -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-return-type -Wno-deprecated-copy -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -fexceptions -frtti -c ../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/src/torque/csa-generator.cc -o v8_snapshot/obj/v8/torque_base/csa-generator.o
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/src/torque/csa-generator.h:8,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/src/torque/csa-generator.cc:5:
/usr/include/c++/8/iostream:38:10: fatal error: bits/c++config.h: No such file or directory
 #include <bits/c++config.h>
          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

New build dependencies needed:

apt install lib32stdc++-8-dev
apt install libc6-dev-i386
dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt install linux-libc-dev:i386

Next round. OpenGL build issues Next bump are OpenGL related compiler issues:

/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ -MMD -MF obj/QtWebEngineCore/gl_ozone_glx_qt.o.d -DCHROMIUM_VERSION=\"80.0.3987.163\" -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -DCR_SYSROOT_HASH=76e6068f9f6954e2ab1ff98ce5fa236d3d85bcbd -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -DQT_NO_LINKED_LIST -DQT_NO_KEYWORDS -DQT_USE_QSTRINGBUILDER -DQ_FORWARD_DECLARE_OBJC_CLASS=QT_FORWARD_DECLARE_CLASS -DQTWEBENGINECORE_VERSION_STR=\"5.15.0\" -DQTWEBENGINEPROCESS_NAME=\"QtWebEngineProcess\" -DBUILDING_CHROMIUM -DQTWEBENGINE_EMBEDDED_SWITCHES -DQT_NO_EXCEPTIONS -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_QUICK_LIB -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_QMLMODELS_LIB -DQT_WEBCHANNEL_LIB -DQT_QML_LIB -DQT_NETWORK_LIB -DQT_POSITIONING_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_WEBENGINECOREHEADERS_LIB -DVK_NO_PROTOTYPES -DGL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES -DUSE_GLX -DUSE_EGL -DGOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_RTTI -DGOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_STATIC_INITIALIZER -DHAVE_PTHREAD -DU_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE=0 -DU_ENABLE_DYLOAD=0 -DUSE_CHROMIUM_ICU=1 -DU_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION -DICU_UTIL_DATA_IMPL=ICU_UTIL_DATA_FILE -DUCHAR_TYPE=uint16_t -DWEBRTC_NON_STATIC_TRACE_EVENT_HANDLERS=0 -DWEBRTC_CHROMIUM_BUILD -DWEBRTC_POSIX -DWEBRTC_LINUX -DABSL_ALLOCATOR_NOTHROW=1 -DWEBRTC_USE_BUILTIN_ISAC_FIX=1 -DWEBRTC_USE_BUILTIN_ISAC_FLOAT=0 -DHAVE_SCTP -DNO_MAIN_THREAD_WRAPPING -DSK_HAS_PNG_LIBRARY -DSK_HAS_WEBP_LIBRARY -DSK_USER_CONFIG_HEADER=\"../../skia/config/SkUserConfig.h\" -DSK_GL -DSK_HAS_JPEG_LIBRARY -DSK_USE_LIBGIFCODEC -DSK_VULKAN_HEADER=\"../../skia/config/SkVulkanConfig.h\" -DSK_VULKAN=1 -DSK_SUPPORT_GPU=1 -DSK_GPU_WORKAROUNDS_HEADER=\"gpu/config/gpu_driver_bug_workaround_autogen.h\" -DVK_NO_PROTOTYPES -DLEVELDB_PLATFORM_CHROMIUM=1 -DLEVELDB_PLATFORM_CHROMIUM=1 -DV8_31BIT_SMIS_ON_64BIT_ARCH -DV8_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS -I../../3rdparty/chromium/skia/config -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/boringssl/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/include/core -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/api -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick/5.15.0/QtQuick -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui/5.15.0/QtGui -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels/5.15.0/QtQmlModels -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml/5.15.0/QtQml -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore/5.15.0/QtCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebchannel/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebchannel/include/QtWebChannel -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtNetwork -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtlocation/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtlocation/include/QtPositioning -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore/5.15.0/QtWebEngineCore -I.moc -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/interface/vcos/pthreads -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/interface/vmcs_host/linux -Igen/.moc -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/mkspecs/devices/linux-rasp-pi2-g++ -Igen -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libyuv/include -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/jsoncpp/source/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/jsoncpp/generated -Igen -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos -I../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/perfetto/include -Igen/third_party/perfetto/build_config -Igen -Igen -Igen/third_party/dawn/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/dawn/src/include -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/boringssl/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/protobuf/src -Igen/protoc_out -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/protobuf/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ced/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/common -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/i18n -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/webrtc_overrides -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/webrtc -Igen/third_party/webrtc -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/abseil-cpp -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libgifcodec -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/vulkanmemoryallocator -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/non_mac -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/linux -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/non_win -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libwebm/source -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/include -Igen/v8/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/mesa_headers -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=hard -mtune=generic-armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mthumb -Wall -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-psabi -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -O2 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -I/home/build/sysroot/usr/include/nss -I/home/build/sysroot/usr/include/nspr -std=gnu++14 -Wno-narrowing -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-attributes -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-subobject-linkage -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-return-type -Wno-deprecated-copy -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti --sysroot=../../../../../../sysroot/ -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 -std=gnu++1y -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -Wno-unused-parameter -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-deprecated-declarations -c /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/ozone/gl_ozone_glx_qt.cpp -o obj/QtWebEngineCore/gl_ozone_glx_qt.o
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings.h:497,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_gl_api_implementation.h:12,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/ozone/gl_ozone_glx_qt.cpp:49:
../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings_autogen_egl.h:227:5: error:  EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID  has not been declared
     EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID set,
     ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings_autogen_egl.h:228:5: error:  EGLGetBlobFuncANDROID  has not been declared
     EGLGetBlobFuncANDROID get);
     ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings_autogen_egl.h:571:46: error:  EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID  has not been declared
                                              EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID set,
                                              ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
../../3rdparty/chromium/ui/gl/gl_bindings_autogen_egl.h:572:46: error:  EGLGetBlobFuncANDROID  has not been declared
                                              EGLGetBlobFuncANDROID get) = 0;
                                              ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
cc1plus: warning: unrecognized command line option  -Wno-deprecated-copy

/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ -MMD -MF obj/QtWebEngineCore/display_gl_output_surface.o.d -DCHROMIUM_VERSION=\"80.0.3987.163\" -DUSE_UDEV -DUSE_AURA=1 -DUSE_NSS_CERTS=1 -DUSE_OZONE=1 -DOFFICIAL_BUILD -DTOOLKIT_QT -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -DNO_UNWIND_TABLES -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -D__STDC_FORMAT_MACROS -DCR_SYSROOT_HASH=76e6068f9f6954e2ab1ff98ce5fa236d3d85bcbd -DNDEBUG -DNVALGRIND -DDYNAMIC_ANNOTATIONS_ENABLED=0 -DQT_NO_LINKED_LIST -DQT_NO_KEYWORDS -DQT_USE_QSTRINGBUILDER -DQ_FORWARD_DECLARE_OBJC_CLASS=QT_FORWARD_DECLARE_CLASS -DQTWEBENGINECORE_VERSION_STR=\"5.15.0\" -DQTWEBENGINEPROCESS_NAME=\"QtWebEngineProcess\" -DBUILDING_CHROMIUM -DQTWEBENGINE_EMBEDDED_SWITCHES -DQT_NO_EXCEPTIONS -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_QUICK_LIB -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_QMLMODELS_LIB -DQT_WEBCHANNEL_LIB -DQT_QML_LIB -DQT_NETWORK_LIB -DQT_POSITIONING_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_WEBENGINECOREHEADERS_LIB -DVK_NO_PROTOTYPES -DGL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES -DUSE_GLX -DUSE_EGL -DGOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_RTTI -DGOOGLE_PROTOBUF_NO_STATIC_INITIALIZER -DHAVE_PTHREAD -DU_USING_ICU_NAMESPACE=0 -DU_ENABLE_DYLOAD=0 -DUSE_CHROMIUM_ICU=1 -DU_STATIC_IMPLEMENTATION -DICU_UTIL_DATA_IMPL=ICU_UTIL_DATA_FILE -DUCHAR_TYPE=uint16_t -DWEBRTC_NON_STATIC_TRACE_EVENT_HANDLERS=0 -DWEBRTC_CHROMIUM_BUILD -DWEBRTC_POSIX -DWEBRTC_LINUX -DABSL_ALLOCATOR_NOTHROW=1 -DWEBRTC_USE_BUILTIN_ISAC_FIX=1 -DWEBRTC_USE_BUILTIN_ISAC_FLOAT=0 -DHAVE_SCTP -DNO_MAIN_THREAD_WRAPPING -DSK_HAS_PNG_LIBRARY -DSK_HAS_WEBP_LIBRARY -DSK_USER_CONFIG_HEADER=\"../../skia/config/SkUserConfig.h\" -DSK_GL -DSK_HAS_JPEG_LIBRARY -DSK_USE_LIBGIFCODEC -DSK_VULKAN_HEADER=\"../../skia/config/SkVulkanConfig.h\" -DSK_VULKAN=1 -DSK_SUPPORT_GPU=1 -DSK_GPU_WORKAROUNDS_HEADER=\"gpu/config/gpu_driver_bug_workaround_autogen.h\" -DVK_NO_PROTOTYPES -DLEVELDB_PLATFORM_CHROMIUM=1 -DLEVELDB_PLATFORM_CHROMIUM=1 -DV8_31BIT_SMIS_ON_64BIT_ARCH -DV8_DEPRECATION_WARNINGS -I../../3rdparty/chromium/skia/config -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/boringssl/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/include/core -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/api -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick/5.15.0/QtQuick -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui/5.15.0/QtGui -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQuick -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtGui -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels/5.15.0/QtQmlModels -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml/5.15.0/QtQml -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore/5.15.0/QtCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQmlModels -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebchannel/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebchannel/include/QtWebChannel -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtdeclarative/include/QtQml -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtNetwork -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtlocation/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtlocation/include/QtPositioning -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/include/QtCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore/5.15.0 -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/include/QtWebEngineCore/5.15.0/QtWebEngineCore -I.moc -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/interface/vcos/pthreads -I/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/interface/vmcs_host/linux -Igen/.moc -I/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtbase/mkspecs/devices/linux-rasp-pi2-g++ -Igen -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libyuv/include -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/jsoncpp/source/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/jsoncpp/generated -Igen -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos -I../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/perfetto/include -Igen/third_party/perfetto/build_config -Igen -Igen -Igen/third_party/dawn/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/dawn/src/include -Igen -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/boringssl/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/protobuf/src -Igen/protoc_out -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/protobuf/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/ced/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/common -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/i18n -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/webrtc_overrides -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/webrtc -Igen/third_party/webrtc -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/abseil-cpp -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libgifcodec -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/skia/third_party/vulkanmemoryallocator -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/vulkan/include -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -Igen/third_party/perfetto -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/non_mac -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/linux -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/crashpad/crashpad/compat/non_win -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/libwebm/source -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase/src -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/leveldatabase/src/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/v8/include -Igen/v8/include -I../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/mesa_headers -fno-strict-aliasing --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -fstack-protector -fno-unwind-tables -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables -fPIC -pipe -pthread -march=armv7-a -mfloat-abi=hard -mtune=generic-armv7-a -mfpu=vfpv3-d16 -mthumb -Wall -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-psabi -Wno-unused-local-typedefs -Wno-maybe-uninitialized -Wno-deprecated-declarations -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wno-comments -Wno-packed-not-aligned -Wno-dangling-else -Wno-missing-field-initializers -Wno-unused-parameter -O2 -fno-ident -fdata-sections -ffunction-sections -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -fvisibility=hidden -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -I/home/build/sysroot/usr/include/nss -I/home/build/sysroot/usr/include/nspr -std=gnu++14 -Wno-narrowing -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-attributes -Wno-class-memaccess -Wno-subobject-linkage -Wno-invalid-offsetof -Wno-return-type -Wno-deprecated-copy -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti --sysroot=../../../../../../sysroot/ -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -g -O2 -fdebug-prefix-map=/home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0=. -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wdate-time -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -O2 -std=gnu++1y -fno-exceptions -Wall -Wextra -D_REENTRANT -Wno-unused-parameter -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-deprecated-declarations -c /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp -o obj/QtWebEngineCore/display_gl_output_surface.o
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_interface.h:8,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_transfer_cache.h:15,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:28,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/GLES2/gl2.h:78: warning: "GL_FALSE" redefined
 #define GL_FALSE                          (GLboolean)0
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_context_state.h:10,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:27,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos/GLES3/gl3.h:85: note: this is the location of the previous definition
 #define GL_FALSE                          0
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_interface.h:8,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_transfer_cache.h:15,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:28,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/GLES2/gl2.h:79: warning: "GL_TRUE" redefined
 #define GL_TRUE                           (GLboolean)1
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_context_state.h:10,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:27,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos/GLES3/gl3.h:86: note: this is the location of the previous definition
 #define GL_TRUE                           1
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_interface.h:8,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_transfer_cache.h:15,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:28,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
/home/build/sysroot/opt/vc/include/GLES2/gl2.h:600:37: error: conflicting declaration of C function  void glShaderSource(GLuint, GLsizei, const GLchar**, const GLint*) 
 GL_APICALL void         GL_APIENTRY glShaderSource (GLuint shader, GLsizei count, const GLchar** string, const GLint* length);
                                     ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In file included from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/client_context_state.h:10,
                 from ../../3rdparty/chromium/gpu/command_buffer/client/gles2_implementation.h:27,
                 from /home/build/armhf/qt-everywhere-src-5.15.0/qtwebengine/src/core/compositor/display_gl_output_surface.cpp:47:
../../3rdparty/chromium/third_party/khronos/GLES3/gl3.h:624:29: note: previous declaration  void glShaderSource(GLuint, GLsizei, const GLchar* const*, const GLint*) 
 GL_APICALL void GL_APIENTRY glShaderSource (GLuint shader, GLsizei count, const GLchar *const*string, const GLint *length);
                             ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~
cc1plus: warning: unrecognized command line option  -Wno-deprecated-copy

I'm out of the allocated hour budget, and I'll stop here for now. Building Qt5 has been providing some of the most nightmarish work time in my entire professional life. If my daily job became being required to deal with this kind of insanity, I would strongly invest in a change of career. Update Andreas Gruber wrote:

Long story short, a fast solution for the issue with EGLSetBlobFuncANDROID is to remove libraspberrypi-dev from your sysroot and do a full rebuild. There will be some changes to the configure results, so please review them - if they are relevant for you - before proceeding with your work.

And thanks to Andreas, the story can continue...

I have started using Goatcounter for analytics after reading this LWN article called "Lightweight alternatives to Google Analytics". Goatcounter has an interesting approach to privacy in that it:

tracks sessions using a hash of the browser's user agent and IP address to identify the client without storing any personal information. The salt used to generate these hashes is rotated every 4 hours with a sliding window.

There was no Debian package for the project, so I filed a request for package and instead made a fork of the project to add a Docker image. This page documents how Goatcounter was setup from there...

Server configuration

build the image from this fork
```
docker build -t zgoat/goatcounter .
```
create volume for db:
```
docker volume create goatcounter
```

start the server:

exec docker run --restart=unless-stopped --volume="goatcounter:/home/user/db/" --publish 127.0.0.1:8081:8080 --detach zgoat/goatcounter serve -listen :8080 -tls none

apache configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>
            ServerName analytics.anarc.at
            Redirect / https://analytics.anarc.at/
            DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
    </VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:443>
        ServerName analytics.anarc.at
        Use common-letsencrypt-ssl analytics.anarc.at
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
        ProxyPass /.well-known/ !
        ProxyPass / http://localhost:8081/
        ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8081/
        ProxyPreserveHost on
</VirtualHost>

add analytics.anarc.at to DNS
create a TLS cert with LE:
```
certbot certonly --webroot  -d analytics.anarc.at --webroot-path /var/www/html/
```
note that goatcounter has code to do this on its own, but we avoid it to follow our existing policies and simplify things

create site:

docker run -it --rm --volume="goatcounter:/home/user/db/" zgoat/goatcounter create -domain analytics.anarc.at -email anarcat+rapports@anarc.at

add to ikiwiki template

rebuild wiki:

ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki.setup --rebuild --verbose

Remaining issues

Docker image should be `FROM scratch`, this is statically built golang stuff after all...

move to Docker Compose or podman instead of just starting the thing by hand

this is all super janky and should be put in config management somehow

remove "anarc.at" test site (the site is the analytics site, not the tracked site), seems like this is not possible yet

do log parsing instead of Javascript or 1x1 images?

compare with goaccess logs, probably at the end of july, to have two full weeks to compare

Fixed issues

cache headers are wrong (120ms!) deployed workaround in apache, reported as a bug upstream

remove self-referer done, just a matter of configuring the URL in the settings. could this be automated too?

add pixel tracking for `noscript` users done, but required a patch to ikiwi (and I noticed another bug while doing it)

`goatcounter monitor` doesn't with sqlite (fixed upstream!)

the :8080 port leaks in some places, namely in the "Site config" documentation that is because i was using `-port 8080` which was not necessary.

tl;dr: Use MessagePack, rather than CBOR. Introduction I recently wanted to choose a binary encoding. This was for a project using Rust serde, so I looked at the list of formats there. I ended up reading about CBOR and MessagePack. Both of these are binary formats for a JSON-like data model. Both of them are "schemaless", meaning you can decode them without knowing the structure. (This also provides some forwards compatibility.) They are, in fact, quite similar (although they are totally incompatible). This is no accident: CBOR is, effectively, a fork of MessagePack. Both formats continue to exist and both are being used in new programs. I needed to make a choice but lacked enough information. I thought I would try to examine the reasons and nature of the split, and to make some kind of judgement about the situation. So I did a lot of reading [11]. Here are my conclusions. History and politics Between about 2010 and 2013 there was only MessagePack. Unfortunately, MessagePack had some problems. The biggest of these was that it lacked a separate string type. Strings were to be encoded simply as byte blocks. This caused serious problems for many MessagePack library implementors: for example, when decoding a MessagePack file the Python library wouldn't know whether to produce a Python bytes object, or a string. Straightforward data structures wouldn't round trip through MessagePack. [1] [2] It seems that in late 2012 this came to the attention to someone with an IETF background. According to them, after unsatisfactory conversations with MessagePack upstream, they decided they would have to fork. They submitted an Internet Draft for a partially-incompatible protocol [3] [4]. Little seemed to happen in the IETF until soon before the Orlando in-person IETF meeting in February 2013.[5] These conversations sparked some discussion in the MessagePack issue tracker. There were long threads including about process [1,2,4 ibid]. But there was also a useful technical discussion, about proposed backward compatible improves to the MessagePack spec.[5] The prominent IETF contributor provided some helpful input in these discussions in the MessagePack community - but also pushed quite hard for a "tagging" system, which suggestion was not accepted (see my technical analysis, below). An improved MessagePack spec resulted, with string support, developed largely by the MessagePack community. It seems to have been available in useable form since mid-2013 and was officially published as canonical in August 2013. Meanwhile a parallel process was pursued in the IETF, based on the IETF contributor's fork, with 11 Internet-Drafts from February[7] to September[8]. This seems to have continued even though the original technical reason for the fork - lack of string vs binary distinction - no longer applied. The IETF proponent expressed unhappiness about MessagePack's stewardship and process as much as they did about the technical details [4, ibid]. The IETF process culminated in the CBOR RFC[9]. The discussion on process questions between the IETF proponent and MessagePack upstream, in the MessagePack issue tracker [4, ibid] should make uncomfortable reading for IETF members. The IETF acceptance of CBOR despite clear and fundamental objections from MessagePack upstream[13] and indeed other respected IETF members[14], does not reflect well on the IETF. The much vaunted openness of the IETF process seems to have been rather one-sided. The IETF proponent here was an IETF Chair. Certainly the CBOR author was very well-spoken and constantly talks about politeness and cooperation and process; but what they actually did was very hostile. They accused the MessagePack community of an "us and them" attitude while simultaneously pursuing a forked specification! The CBOR RFC does mention MessagePack in Appendix E.2. But not to acknowledge that CBOR was inspired by MessagePack. Rather, it does so to make a set of tendentious criticisms of MessagePack. Perhaps these criticisms were true when they were first written in an I-D but they were certainly false by the time the RFC was actually published, which occurred after the MessagePack improvement process was completely concluded, with a formal spec issued. Since then both formats have existed in parallel. Occasionally people discuss which one is better, and sometimes it is alleged that "yes CBOR is the successor to MessagePack", which is not really fair.[9][10] Technical differences The two formats have a similar arrangement: initial byte which can encode small integers, or type and length, or type and specify a longer length encoding. But there are important differences. Overall, MessagePack is very significantly simpler. Floating point CBOR supports five floating point formats! Not only three sizes of IEEE754, but also decimal floating point, and bigfloats. This seems astonishing for a supposedly-simple format. (Some of these are supported via the semi-optional tag mechanism - see below.) Indefinite strings and arrays Like MessagePack, CBOR mostly precedes items with their length. But CBOR also supports "indefinite" strings, arrays, and so on, where the length is not specified at the beginning. The object (array, string, whatever) is terminated by a special "break" item. This seems to me to be a mistake. If you wanted the kind of application where MessagePack or CBOR would be useful, streaming sub-objects of unknown length is not that important. This possibility considerably complicates decoders. CBOR tagging system CBOR has a second layer of sort-of-type which can be attached to each data item. The set of possible tags is open-ended and extensible, but the CBOR spec itself gives tag values for: two kinds of date format; positive and negative bignums; decimal floats (see above); binary but expected to be encoded if converted to JSON (in base64url, base64, or base16); nestedly encoded CBOR; URIs; base64 data (two formats); regexps; MIME messages; and a special tag to make file(1) work. In practice it is not clear how many of these are used, but a decoder must be prepared to at least discard them. The amount of additional spec complexity here is quite astonishing. IMO binary formats like this will (just like JSON) be used by a next layer which always has an idea of what the data means, including (where the data is a binary blob) what encoding it is in etc. So these tags are not useful. These tags might look like a middle way between (i) extending the binary protocol with a whole new type such as an extension type (incompatible with old readers) and encoding your new kind data in a existing type (leaving all readers who don't know the schema to print it as just integers or bytes or string). But I think they are more trouble than they are worth. The tags are uncomfortably similar to the ASN.1 tag system, which is widely regarded as one of ASN.1's unfortunate complexities. MessagePack extension mechanism MessagePack explicitly reserves some encoding space for users and for future extensions: there is an "extension type". The payload is an extension type byte plus some more data bytes; the data bytes are in a format to be defined by the extension type byte. Half of the possible extension byte values are reserved for future specification, and half are designated for application use. This is pleasingly straightforward. (There is also one unused primary initial byte value, but that would be rejected by existing decoders and doesn't seem like a likely direction for future expansion.) Minor other differences in integer encoding The encodings of integers differ. In MessagePack, signed and unsigned integers have different typecodes. In CBOR, signed and unsigned positive integers have the same typecodes; negative integers have a different set of typecodes. This means that a CBOR reader which knows it is expecting a signed value will have to do a top-bit-set check on the actual data value! And a CBOR writer must check the value to choose a typecode. MessagePack reserves fewer shortcodes for small negative integers, than for small positive integers. Conclusions and lessons MessagePack seems to have been prompted into fixing the missing string type problem, but only by the threat of a fork. However, this fork went ahead even after MessagePack clearly accepted the need for a string type. MessagePack had a fixed protocol spec before the IETF did. The continued pursuit of the IETF fork was ostensibly been motivated by a disapproval of the development process and in particular a sense that the IETF process was superior. However, it seems to me that the IETF process was abused by CBOR's proponent, who just wanted things their own way. I have seen claims by IETF proponents that the open decisionmaking system inherently produces superior results. However, in this case the IETF process produced a bad specification. To the extent that other IETF contributors had influence over the ultimate CBOR RFC, I don't think they significantly improved it. CBOR has been described as MessagePack bikeshedded by the IETF. That would have been bad enough, but I think it's worse than that. To a large extent CBOR is one person's NIH-induced bad design rubber stamped by the IETF. CBOR's problems are not simply matters of taste: it's significantly overcomplicated. One lesson for the rest of us is that although being the upstream and nominally in charge of a project seems to give us a lot of power, it's wise to listen carefully to one's users and downstreams. Once people are annoyed enough to fork, the fork will have a life of its own. Another lesson is that many of us should be much warier of the supposed moral authority of the IETF. Many IETF standards are awful (Oauth 2 [12]; IKE; DNSSEC; the list goes on). Sometimes (especially when network adoption effects are weak, as with MessagePack vs CBOR) better results can be obtained from a smaller group, or even an individual, who simply need the thing for their own uses. Finally, governance systems of public institutions like the IETF need to be robust in defending the interests of outsiders (and hence of society at large) against eloquent insiders who know how to work the process machinery. Any institution which nominally serves the public good faces a constant risk of devolving into self-servingness. This risk gets worse the more powerful and respected the institution becomes. References

~~#13~~: First-class string type in serialization specification (MessagePack issue tracker, June 2010 - August 2013)
~~#121~~: Msgpack can't differentiate between raw binary data and text strings (MessagePack issue tracker, November 2012 - February 2013)
draft-bormann-apparea-bpack-00: The binarypack JSON-like representation format (IETF Internet-Draft, October 2012)
~~#129~~: MessagePack should be developed in an open process (MessagePack issue tracker, February 2013 - March 2013)
Re: JSON mailing list and BoF (IETF apps-discuss mailing list message from Carsten Bormann, 18 February 2013)
~~#128~~: Discussions on the upcoming MessagePack spec that adds the string type to the protocol (MessagePack issue tracker, February 2013 - August 2013)
draft-bormann-apparea-bpack-01: The binarypack JSON-like representation format (IETF Internet-Draft, February 2013)
draft-bormann-cbor: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) (IETF Internet-Drafts, May 2013 - September 2013)
RFC 7049: Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) (October 2013)
"MessagePack should be replaced with [CBOR] everywhere ..." (floatboth on Hacker News, 8th April 2017)
Discussion with very useful set of history links (camgunz on Hacker News, 9th April 2017)
OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell (Eran Hammer, blog posting from 2012, via Wayback Machine)
Re: [apps-discuss] [Json] msgpack/binarypack (Re: JSON mailing list and BoF) (IETF list message from Sadyuki Furuhashi, 4th March 2013)
"no apologies for complaining about this farce" (IETF list message from Phillip Hallam-Baker, 15th August 2013)
Edited 2020-07-14 18:55 to fix a minor formatting issue, and 2020-07-14 22:54 to fix two typos

comments

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in July) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games Short news

The last month saw a new upstream release of Minetest (version 5.3.), a multi-player sandbox game similar to Minecraft. A backport to buster-backports will follow shortly.
Asher Gordon helped release a new version of Berusky 2, a sokoban like logic game but in 3D. The game received several improvements including bug fixes, code polishing and a new way to access the data files. Previously those files were all packed in a special container format but now they can be accessed directly without someone having to rely on some sort of unarchiver. I have uploaded this version as 0.12-1 to Debian unstable.
I tested an upstream patch for empire to address the build failure with GCC 10. This one is a better solution than the currently implemented workaround and I expect it to be included in the next upstream release.
I fixed two FTBFS in simutrans-pak64 and simutrans-pak128.britain, two addon packages for the simulation game simutrans.

Debian Java

New upstream versions this month: hsqldb, libpdfbox2-java, jackson-jr, jackson-dataformat-xml and jackson-databind. The latter upload addressed several security vulnerabilites which have become rather minor because upstream has enabled safe default typing by default now. Nevertheless I have prepared a buster-security update as well which is already available in buster-proposed-updates.

Misc

I packaged new versions of wabt, privacybadger and binaryen and applied another upstream patch for xarchiver to address the incomplete fix for Debian bug #959914, to better handle encrypted multi-volume 7zip archives.
By popular request I uploaded imlib2 version 1.6 to buster-backports because the image library supports the webp format now.

Debian LTS This was my 52. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 60 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

DLA-2278-1. Issued a security update for squid3 fixing 19 CVE.
DLA-2279-1. Issued a security update for tomcat8 fixing 2 CVE.
Prepared and uploaded a stretch-pu update for jackson-databind fixing 20 CVE. (#964727)
Synced the proftpd-dfsg version from Jessie with Stretch to address a memory leak which leads to a denial-of-service and correct the version number to make seemless updates work.
Prepared the security update for imagemagick triaging and/or fixing 76 CVE.
Worked on updating the database about embedded code copies to determine how packages are affected by security vulnerabilities in embedded code copies. This included a) compiling a list of important packages which are regular affected by CVE, b) investigating if embedded code copies are present, c) determining the possible impact of a security vulnerability in those embedded code copies, d) writing a script that automates printing those findings on demand.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

On July 18th Stretch LTS starts, offering two more years of security support to the Debian Stretch release. Stretch LTS will be the fourth iteration of LTS, following Squeeze LTS which started in 2014, Wheezy LTS in 2016 and Jessie LTS in 2018. However, for the first time, we have prepared a small survey about our users and contributors, who they are and why they are using LTS. Filling out the survey should take less than 10 minutes. We would really appreciate if you could participate in the survey online! In two weeks (July 27th 2020) we will close the survey, so please don't hesitate and participate now! After that, there will be a followup email with the results. More information about Debian LTS is available at https://wiki.debian.org/LTS, including generic contact information. Click here to fill out the survey now!

Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop

police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

I was a police chief stopped by my own officer. After Floyd, we need change at all levels.

police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

Hi White People! I want to tell you something about my experience with white progressive backlash

police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

We've detected that JavaScript is disabled in your browser. Would you like to proceed to legacy Twitter?

Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

As nationwide protests over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are met with police brutality, John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing ...

Morte di Stefano Cucchi - Wikipedia

italy police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

La morte di Stefano Cucchi avvenne a Roma il 22 ottobre 2009 mentre il giovane era sottoposto a custodia cautelare. Le cause della morte e le responsabilit sono oggetto di procedimenti giudiziari che hanno coinvolto da un lato i medici dell'ospedale Pertini,[1][2][3][4] dall'altro continuano a coinvolgere, a vario titolo, pi militari dell Arma dei Carabinieri[5][6]. Il caso ha attirato l'attenzione dell'opinione pubblica a seguito della pubblicazione delle foto dell'autopsia, poi riprese da agenzie di stampa, giornali e telegiornali italiani[7]. La vicenda ha ispirato, altres , documentari e lungometraggi cinematografici.[8][9][10]

Morte di Giuseppe Uva - Wikipedia

italy police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

La morte di Giuseppe Uva avvenne il 14 giugno 2008 dopo che, nella notte tra il 13 e il 14 giugno, era stato fermato ubriaco da due carabinieri che lo portarono in caserma, dalla quale venne poi trasferito, per un trattamento sanitario obbligatorio, nell'ospedale di Varese, dove mor la mattina successiva per arresto cardiaco. Secondo la tesi dell'accusa, la morte fu causata dalla costrizione fisica subita durante l'arresto e dalle successive violenze e torture che ha subito in caserma. Il processo contro i due carabinieri che eseguirono l'arresto e contro altri sei agenti di polizia ha assolto gli imputati dalle accuse di omicidio preterintenzionale e sequestro di persona[1][2][3][4]. Alla vicenda dedicato il documentario Viva la sposa di Ascanio Celestini[1][5].

Caso Aldrovandi - Wikipedia

italy police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

Il caso Aldrovandi la vicenda giudiziaria causata dall'uccisione di Federico Aldrovandi, uno studente ferrarese, avvenuta il 25 settembre 2005 a seguito di un controllo di polizia.[1][2][3] I procedimenti giudiziari hanno condannato, il 6 luglio 2009, quattro poliziotti a 3 anni e 6 mesi di reclusione, per "eccesso colposo nell'uso legittimo delle armi";[1][4] il 21 giugno 2012 la Corte di cassazione ha confermato la condanna.[1] All'inchiesta per stabilire la cause della morte ne sono seguite altre per presunti depistaggi e per le querele fra le parti interessate.[1] Il caso stato oggetto di grande attenzione mediatica e ha ispirato un documentario, stato morto un ragazzo.[1][5]

Federico Aldrovandi - Wikipedia

italy police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

Federico Aldrovandi (17 July 1987 in Ferrara 25 September 2005 in Ferrara) was an Italian student, who was killed by four policemen.[1]

Aldrovandi, il film di Vendemmiati gratis on line Articolo21

italy police politics archive.org

2020-07-13

24 Giugno 2020

Ansible Molecule is a toolkit for testing Ansible roles. It allows for easy execution and verification of your roles and also manages the environment (container, VM, etc) in which those are executed. In the Foreman project we have a collection of Ansible roles to setup Foreman instances called forklift. The roles vary from configuring Libvirt and Vagrant for our CI to deploying full fledged Foreman and Katello setups with Proxies and everything. The repository also contains a dynamic Vagrant file that can generate Foreman and Katello installations on all supported Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS platforms using the previously mentioned roles. This feature is super helpful when you need to debug something specific to an OS/version combination. Up until recently, all those roles didn't have any tests. We would run ansible-lint on them, but that was it. As I am planning to do some heavier work on some of the roles to enhance our upgrade testing, I decided to add some tests first. Using Molecule, of course. Adding Molecule to an existing role is easy: molecule init scenario -r my-role-name will add all the necessary files/examples for you. It's left as an exercise to the reader how to actually test the role properly as this is not what this post is about. Executing the tests with Molecule is also easy: molecule test. And there are also examples how to integrate the test execution with the common CI systems. But what happens if you have more than one role in the repository? Molecule has support for monorepos, however that is rather limited: it will detect the role path correctly, so roles can depend on other roles from the same repository, but it won't find and execute tests for roles if you run it from the repository root. There is an undocumented way to set MOLECULE_GLOB so that Molecule would detect test scenarios in different paths, but I couldn't get it to work nicely for executing tests of multiple roles and upstream currently does not plan to implement this. Well, bash to the rescue!

for roledir in roles/*/molecule; do
    pushd $(dirname $roledir)
    molecule test
    popd
done

Add that to your CI and be happy! The CI will execute all available tests and you can still execute those for the role you're hacking on by just calling molecule test as you're used to. However, we can do even better. When you initialize a role with Molecule or add Molecule to an existing role, there are quite a lot of files added in the molecule directory plus an yamllint configuration in the role root. If you have many roles, you will notice that especially the molecule.yml and .yamllint files look very similar for each role. It would be much nicer if we could keep those in a shared place. Molecule supports a "base config": a configuration file that gets merged with the molecule.yml of your project. By default, that's ~/.config/molecule/config.yml, but Molecule will actually look for a .config/molecule/config.yml in two places: the root of the VCS repository and your HOME. And guess what? The one in the repository wins (that's not yet well documented). So by adding a .config/molecule/config.yml to the repository, we can place all shared configuration there and don't have to duplicate it in every role. And that .yamllint file? We can also move that to the repository root and add the following to Molecule's (now shared) configuration:

lint: yamllint --config-file $ MOLECULE_PROJECT_DIRECTORY /../../.yamllint --format parsable .

This will define the lint action as calling yamllint with the configuration stored in the repository root instead of the project directory, assuming you store your roles as roles/<rolename>/ in the repository. And that's it. We now have a central place for our Molecule and yamllint configurations and only need to place role-specific data into the role directory.

My laptop battery started to explode in slow motion. HP requires 10 business days to repair my laptop under warranty, and I cannot afford that length of downtime. Alternatively, HP quoted me 375 + VAT for on-site repairs, which I tought was very funny. For 376.55 + VAT, which is pretty much exactly the same amount, I bought instead a refurbished ThinkPad X240 with a dual-core I5, 8G of RAM, 250G SSD, and a 1920x1080 IPS display, to use as a spare while my laptop is being repaired. I'd like to thank HP for giving me the opportunity to own a ThinkPad. Since I'm migrating all my system to the spare and then (hopefully) back, I'm documenting what I need to be fully productive on new hardware. Install Debian A basic Debian netinst with no tasks selected is good enough to get going. Note that if wifi worked in Debian Installer, it doesn't mean that it will work in the minimal system it installed. See here for instructions on quickly bringing up wifi on a newly installed minimal system. Copy /home A simple tar of /home is all I needed to copy my data over. A neat way to do it was connecting the two laptops with an ethernet cable, and using netcat:

# On the source
tar -C / -zcf - home   nc -l -p 12345 -N
# On the target
nc 10.0.0.1 12345   tar -C / -zxf -

Since the data travel unencrypted in this way, don't do it over wifi. Install packages I maintain a few simple local metapackages that depend on the packages I usually used. I could just install those and let apt bring in their dependencies. For the build dependencies of the programs I develop, I use mk-build-deps from the devscripts package to create metapackages that make sure they are installed. Here's an extract from debian/control of the metapackage:

Source: enrico
Section: admin
Priority: optional
Maintainer: Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 11)
Standards-Version: 3.7.2.1
Package: enrico
Section: admin
Architecture: all
Depends:
  mc, mmv, moreutils, powertop, syncmaildir, notmuch,
  ncdu, vcsh, ddate, jq, git-annex, eatmydata,
  vdirsyncer, khal, etckeeper, moc, pwgen
Description: Enrico's working environment
Package: enrico-devel
Section: devel
Architecture: all
Depends:
  git, python3-git, git-svn, gitk, ansible, fabric,
  valgrind, kcachegrind, zeal, meld, d-feet, flake8, mypy, ipython3,
  strace, ltrace
Description: Enrico's development environment
Package: enrico-gui
Section: x11
Architecture: all
Depends:
  xclip, gnome-terminal, qalculate-gtk, liferea, gajim,
  mumble, sm, syncthing, virt-manager
Recommends: k3b
Description: Enrico's GUI environment
Package: enrico-sanity
Section: admin
Architecture: all
Conflicts: libapache2-mod-php, libapache2-mod-php5, php5, php5-cgi, php5-fpm, libapache2-mod-php7.0, php7.0, libphp7.0-embed, libphp-embed, libphp5-embed
Description: Enrico's sanity
 Metapackage with a list of packages that I do not want anywhere near my
 system.

System-wide customizations I tend to avoid changing system-wide configuration as much as possible, so copying over /home and installing packages takes care of 99% of my needs. There are a few system-wide tweaks I cannot do without:

setup postfix to send mail using my mail server
copy Network Manager system connections files in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/
update-alternatives --config editor

For postfix, I have a little ansible playbook that takes care of it. Network Manager system connections need to be copied manually: a plain copy and a systemctl restart network-manager are enough. Note that Network Manager will ignore the files unless their owner and permissions are what it expects. Fine tuning Comparing the output of dpkg --get-selections between the old and the new system might highlight packages manually installed in a hurry and not added to the metapackages. Finally, what remains is fixing the sad state of mimetype associations, which seem to associate opening file depending on whatever application was installed last, phases of the moon, and what option is the most annoying. Currently on my system, PDFs are opened in inkscape by xdg-open and in calibre by run-mailcap. Let's see how long it takes to figure this one out.

Search Results: "ema"

27 July 2020

Russ Allbery: Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop

25 July 2020

Craig Small: 25 Years of Free Software

24 July 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: anytime 0.3.8: Minor Maintenance

Changes in anytime version 0.3.8 (2020-07-23)

A small utility function was added to detect the Linux distribution used in order to fine-tune tests once more.

Travis now uses Ubuntu 'bionic' and R 4.0.*.

Mike Gabriel: Ayatana Indicators / IDO - Menu Rendering Fixed with vanilla GTK-3+

Evgeni Golov: Building documentation for Ansible Collections using antsibull

23 July 2020

Sean Whitton: keyboardingupdates

Sean Whitton: Kinesis Advantage 2 for heavy Emacs users

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, June 2020

22 July 2020

Junichi Uekawa: Joys of sshfs slave mode.

20 July 2020

Evgeni Golov: Building and publishing documentation for Ansible Collections

Shirish Agarwal: Hearing loss, pandemic, lockdown

18 July 2020

Chris Lamb: The comedy is over

16 July 2020

Enrico Zini: Build Qt5 cross-builder with raspbian sysroot: compiling with the sysroot

15 July 2020

Antoine Beaupr : Goatcounter analytics in ikiwiki

14 July 2020

Ian Jackson: MessagePack vs CBOR (RFC7049)

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in June 2020

13 July 2020

Bits from Debian: Debian Long Term Support (LTS) users and contributors survey

12 July 2020

Enrico Zini: Police brutality links

Evgeni Golov: Using Ansible Molecule to test roles in monorepos

9 July 2020

Enrico Zini: Laptop migration

Search Results: "ema"

27 July 2020

25 July 2020

24 July 2020

Changes in anytime version 0.3.8 (2020-07-23) A small utility function was added to detect the Linux distribution used in order to fine-tune tests once more. Travis now uses Ubuntu 'bionic' and R 4.0.*.

23 July 2020

22 July 2020

20 July 2020

18 July 2020

16 July 2020

15 July 2020

14 July 2020

13 July 2020

12 July 2020

9 July 2020

Changes in anytime version 0.3.8 (2020-07-23)

A small utility function was added to detect the Linux distribution used in order to fine-tune tests once more.

Travis now uses Ubuntu 'bionic' and R 4.0.*.