Why prepend a path to database?

[2bndy5]

Why prepend a base path at all and not just pass it to clang-tidy as specified? That would be less surprising since all other paths are relative to the current working directory as well (e.g. ignore).

Originally posted by @BurningEnlightenment in #65 (comment)

[2bndy5]

Moved this question to a new thread because it could be a new feature if we work it right.

[2bndy5]

Note to self: This feature would be considered a breaking change (major version bump).

[BurningEnlightenment]

I just had a look at your sources; is there a specific reason for using RUNNER_WORKSPACE instead of GITHUB_WORKSPACE?

cpp-linter-action/cpp_linter/run.py

Line 42 in d24e622

RUNNER_WORKSPACE = os.getenv("RUNNER_WORKSPACE", "")

cpp-linter-action/cpp_linter/run.py

Lines 423 to 424 in d24e622

	if RUNNER_WORKSPACE:
	path_to_db = RUNNER_WORKSPACE

According to the github actions documentation GITHUB_WORKSPACE points to the default checkout path. While I find no mention of RUNNER_WORKSPACE it seems to always be pointing to the wrong directory in this case.

[2bndy5]

Because the runner workspace is different from the docker's workspace.

[2bndy5]

@shenxianpeng It might be easier to identify when using the docker at runtime if the docker image set a environment variable. We could probably do this from the action.yml in this repo, but it might be good to have in the docker container.

If we could more easily identify when the docker is in use (at runtime), then we can make this path prepending conditional on the presence of the docker workspace.

[BurningEnlightenment]

A mostly backward compatible option could be to only prepend a path if database isn't an absolute path. In which case I could simply do --database=${{ github.workspace }}/build/x64-linux-clang.

[2bndy5]

I like where your head is at! If you're comfortable with python, you could submit a PR with that idea. Otherwise, it may take me a while to carve out some time to test/implement it myself.

[shenxianpeng]

@2bndy5 OK, we can set an environment variable to the docker image to identify it is running.

[shenxianpeng]

A new docker image xianpengshen/clang-tools:all with environment variable CLANG_VERSIONS is ready.

Status: Downloaded newer image for xianpengshen/clang-tools:all
root@bb3520f7c535:/src# echo $CLANG_VERSIONS
14 13

[2bndy5]

I'm starting to think that making the given database path absolute is required for compatibility with all versions of clang-tidy... I'm getting inconsistent results in the unit test.

• clang-tidy's working directory may not be the same as the repo-root option (even though the action does cd repo-root)
• clang-tidy v10 seems to attempt making the database path absolute if it is given as relative

[2bndy5]

Turns out RUNNER_WORKSPACE is always declared (even when not using the docker env), but it is only useful to us when in the docker env. So, I used the new docker env var CLANG_VERSIONS to identify when to use GITHUB_WORKSPACE. Now the action correctly converts a relative database path to absolute if the given path to database is relative.

The unit tests are passing now, but I have to make sure this doesn't break compatibility with the docker env (unit tests are not using the docker env).