Build an autotools project under Bear

By the end of this page you will have built libtasn1 4.20.0 twice: once the ordinary way, once under Bear, and compared what each run leaves behind. This page assumes Bear is already installed; see Getting started with Bear for a first run against a plain Makefile project, or Install Bear for platform packages.

Get a real project

libtasn1 is a small GNU library built with automake and autoconf, a common shape for the C and C++ projects Bear targets. Its release tarball ships a generated configure script, so building it needs nothing beyond a C compiler and make, no autoconf or automake installed. Download and extract it:

curl -fsSL -O https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtasn1/libtasn1-4.20.0.tar.gz
tar xzf libtasn1-4.20.0.tar.gz
cd libtasn1-4.20.0

GNU’s release tarballs do not change after release, so this download always matches this checksum:

$ sha256sum libtasn1-4.20.0.tar.gz
92e0e3bd4c02d4aeee76036b2ddd83f0c732ba4cda5cb71d583272b23587a76c  libtasn1-4.20.0.tar.gz

Build it the ordinary way

./configure
make

This builds libtasn1.so under lib/.libs/, the same as it would for anyone packaging or installing this library. Look for a compilation database and there is none:

$ ls compile_commands.json
ls: cannot access 'compile_commands.json': No such file or directory

Nothing here was written to produce one; configure and make have no notion of a compilation database. That is the gap Bear fills.

Build it under Bear

Start from a clean tree and repeat the same two commands, this time running make under Bear:

make distclean
./configure
bear -- make

./configure is exactly the command from the previous section, run the same way, outside Bear. Only make runs under Bear. Preload interception, the default on Linux, watches every process the build spawns, so it does not matter that configure ran unsupervised earlier: Bear only needs to be watching for the commands it must record, and those are the compiler invocations make issues. “Build it again, in wrapper mode” below builds this same project a second time under the other interception method, where the configure step does need to run under Bear.

Look at the result

$ grep -c '"file":' compile_commands.json
34

libtasn1’s Makefile.am recurses into six subdirectories, and each one contributes its own entries: lib (9), lib/gl (3), src (4), src/gl (14), examples (3), fuzz (1). If you get fewer, check whether make stopped early: this release also builds its Texinfo manual, which needs makeinfo from the texinfo package, and a failure there ends the recursion before the last directories are reached. That is worth seeing once, because it is the general case with interception: Bear records what the build got to, so a build that stops early gives you a database that stops with it. A recursive automake build like this compiles in several directories at once, and gnulib’s bundled replacement sources under the two gl directories are compiled with their own flags, separate from the library’s.

Here is one entry from lib:

{
  "file": "ASN1.c",
  "arguments": [
    "/usr/bin/gcc",
    "-DHAVE_CONFIG_H",
    "-I.",
    "-I..",
    "-I./gl",
    "-I./includes",
    "-DASN1_BUILDING",
    "-fanalyzer",
    "-Wall",
    "-Wextra",
    "-Wshadow",
    "-Wwrite-strings",
    "...",
    "-g",
    "-O2",
    "-c",
    "ASN1.c",
    "-fPIC",
    "-o",
    ".libs/ASN1.o"
  ],
  "directory": "/home/you/libtasn1-4.20.0/lib",
  "output": ".libs/ASN1.o"
}

(the real entry lists several dozen more -W flags; they are elided above with ...)

And one from src/gl:

{
  "file": "cloexec.c",
  "arguments": [
    "/usr/bin/gcc",
    "-DHAVE_CONFIG_H",
    "-I.",
    "-I../..",
    "-Wno-cast-qual",
    "-Wno-conversion",
    "-Wno-sign-compare",
    "-Wno-unused-function",
    "-Wno-unused-parameter",
    "-g",
    "-O2",
    "-c",
    "cloexec.c",
    "-fPIC",
    "-o",
    ".libs/libsgl_la-cloexec.o"
  ],
  "directory": "/home/you/libtasn1-4.20.0/src/gl",
  "output": ".libs/libsgl_la-cloexec.o"
}

lib turns on a wall of analyzer and style warnings for libtasn1’s own code; src/gl turns most of them back off, because that directory holds gnulib’s imported replacement sources, not code the project wants held to its own warning level. One database, one directory per entry, describes the whole recursive build: a tool reading it gets the flags that actually compiled each file, instead of one guessed command applied everywhere.

Use the database: clangd

$ clangd --check=lib/ASN1.c
I[...] Compile command from CDB is: [/home/you/libtasn1-4.20.0/lib] /usr/bin/gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -I./gl -I./includes -DASN1_BUILDING -fanalyzer -Wall -Wextra ... -g -O2 -c -fPIC -o .libs/ASN1.o -resource-dir=... -- /home/you/libtasn1-4.20.0/lib/ASN1.c

clangd pulled the same flags straight out of compile_commands.json, directory and all. See Set up clangd for a project without CMake for the editor side of this hand-off.

Build it again, in wrapper mode

Preload interception, used above, watches every process the build spawns, so it never mattered that ./configure ran outside Bear: the commands Bear needed to see were make’s. Wrapper mode works differently: it puts wrapper executables on PATH in place of the real compilers, so a step that discovers and records the compiler has to see the wrapper while it does so, or the build later invokes the real compiler directly and Bear observes nothing. For libtasn1, that step is ./configure. See How Bear works for the mechanism behind both interception methods.

That makes this project’s configure step the one place on this site where running under Bear is required, not just harmless. Write a bear.yml next to the source tree:

schema: "4.2"
intercept:
  mode: wrapper

Bear finds bear.yml in the current working directory on its own, so no flag is needed; naming it explicitly with --config bear.yml works the same way. This same file selects wrapper mode as the interception method on every platform, including Linux and the BSDs, where preload is otherwise the default. Configure Bear covers the rest of the file’s keys and the other places Bear looks for it.

From a clean tree, run configure and make as two separate Bear invocations, in order:

make distclean
bear --config bear.yml -- ./configure
bear --config bear.yml -- make

The first command writes a database of its own: six entries, all of them configure’s own throwaway compiler probes (conftest.c and similar, plus a libtool probe under a temporary directory), not libtasn1’s sources. The second command writes the same 34 entries, across the same six directories, as the preload build above, with no conftest entry among them. Bear overwrites the output file on every run by default, so the second command’s database simply replaces the first’s; the probes are not merged in and do not need to be filtered out. Do not add --append to either command here, since that flag places new entries alongside the old ones instead of replacing them, which would let the probes survive into the final database.

Next steps

Generate compile_commands.json for a Makefile project for the autotools variations this page skipped: the general conftest.c probe caveat, incremental and parallel builds.
Recover compile_commands.json from a build log if you cannot run the build yourself, only read its log.
How Bear works for the interception mechanism behind every build on this page.

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