rizsotto/Bear 4.2.2

on GitHub

Bear 4.2.2 is a small maintenance release. It ships one new flag,
--overwrite, which changes nothing today and exists so that scripts can
adopt it before a future release makes appending the default. The rest is
a test fix for a false failure on Gentoo, a dependency refresh, and the
documentation for the flag.

Features

• --overwrite names the current default - accepted wherever
  --append is, in combined mode and in the semantic and parse-sh
  subcommands. It selects the behaviour Bear already has: replace the
  output file with only this run's entries. Passing it today changes
  nothing.

  The flag exists to give scripts a migration path. A future release
  makes appending the default, so that a run which captures nothing stops
  replacing a good compile_commands.json with an empty one. Until that
  flag existed there was no way for a script to name the behaviour it
  depends on, so the break would have landed with no way to prepare for
  it. A script that needs today's overwrite behaviour can adopt
  --overwrite now and keep working across the change.

  Passing --append and --overwrite together is a usage error rather
  than a precedence rule. The two state opposite intents, and picking a
  winner would let the contradiction survive the default change, where it
  would quietly start losing or keeping entries depending on which rule
  had been chosen.

Internal Refactoring

• The ambiguous-name probe test reads the dispatch verdict - it now
  parses the interpreter id and the verdict from their own positions in
  the log line instead of substring-matching it. The old check read
  NotRecognized( as Recognized(, and matched "gcc" anywhere in the
  dumped build environment, so a Gentoo package build that exports
  CFLAGS=-frecord-gcc-switches tripped it even though Bear had
  dispatched to Clang correctly. Bear's behaviour was never wrong here;
  only the test's reading of the log was. The test now reproduces the
  Gentoo environment rather than leaving it to the host. (#716)
• Refreshed Cargo.lock ahead of the release, taking semver-compatible
  updates to serde-saphyr, which, log, cc and five transitive
  crates. No manifest requirements changed and no advisories are
  outstanding.

Documentation

• The man page documents --overwrite in all three modes and states that
  appending becomes the default in a future release.
• A new rationale entry, append-default-migration, records why the flag
  ships a release ahead of the behaviour it selects, why --overwrite
  rather than --no-append or --truncate, and why the two flags are
  rejected together rather than ordered by precedence.

Closed Issues

• #716 - probe dispatch test fails on Gentoo package builds

Thanks

Thanks to @DarthGandalf for reporting #716 with the environment detail
that made it reproducible; the failure needed a specific CFLAGS value
to show up at all. It surfaced while packaging Bear for Gentoo, which is
the kind of report only a packager runs into.

Thanks to the downstream packagers who keep Bear available and current -
chronically invisible work that this project depends on. Everyone below
has shipped a 4.x release:

• Alpine - @rtmongold
• ALT Linux - Mikhail Tergoev
• AOSC OS
• Arch, Artix, Manjaro, and Parabola maintainers
• Fedora and EPEL maintainers
• FreeBSD - aokblast
• Gentoo and LiGurOS - @DarthGandalf, with Gentoo proxy-maint
• Homebrew
• MSYS2
• Nix - Justin Restivo
• SlackBuilds
• Termux - @nguynkhn

Full Changelog: 4.2.1...4.2.2