Is it possible to run Bear via manual LD_PRELOAD?

[yugr]

I'm trying to collect compilation database in a package build system (pbuilder) environment. Unfortunately the build infrastructure does not provide control over build command so I can not simply apply bear to it:

$ bear make clean all

I do have control over environment variables though so I could set LD_PRELOAD by hand prior to running the build. I this possible? If yes, could this scenario be added to docs?

[rizsotto]

Hey @yugr , this is a good question. I don't think the LD_PRELOAD itself can help you out to solve the pbuilder limitation. (Definitely not with the 3.x versions, maybe with the 2.4 version.)

• one of the workaround can be to run the pbuilder command itself inside Bear. bear --config config.json -- pbuilder ... The config file shall say that output.content.include_only_existing_source should set to false, and the output.content.paths_to_include should be set to the source directory of your project. (I would run first without the paths_to_include set, to see which files it lists.) You can speed up this process by running the intercept command once against the build, and just run subsequent citnames to customize the output.
• the other workaround I can imagine is to create a fake tool directory. Just create a directory which contains a new make program, which calls bear -- /usr/bin/make $@, and set your PATH to have this directory in the front. Then run pbuilder which is likely to pick up fake make program.

I made these suggestion without really know how pbuilder works. (I did try this with arch linux package maker though.)

[yugr]

Thank you for the suggestion, for make it would indeed work. But it won't help with other build systems: ninja, scons, python setuptools, Perl-Build or even custom shell scripts (Debian has over 50K OSS packages and you'd be surprised how inventive people are). In theory all of those would need to be instrumented which does not make it a scalable solution.