How to preserve pip install temporary directory for error analyse?

Honestly I have a solution, but honestly I could not give a medal for their work to the pip devs.

1. Pip has a --no-clean flag. On the docs, it preserves the temporary directories for further analyse. In the reality, it preserves only some of them, and the others will be still deleted. But that is a good first try - if you have luck, you can find what you want to.

2. Somewhere I have also read, pip actually has configuration files, whose pathes you can get with the command pip config -v list. It has a .ini syntax and there are multiple places where you can ask pip to not delete things.

3. And this is what I have done. I have executed pip with hooking the deletion-related libc calls to a doing-nothing function. On this way, pip could not delete anything, note it might cause problems in the compilation, but it is also a working method. The steps are:

3.1. Create a .c file with this, for example with the name hook.c:

int unlink(char* path) {
  return 0;
}

int unlinkat(int dirfd, char* pathname, int flags) {
  return 0;
}

int rmdir(char* path) {
  return 0;
}

Then compile it to shared lib with the command gcc -shared -o hook.so hook.c.

Now, if you execute any command by prefixing it with a LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/hook.so pip ...., then it won't be able to delete anything any more. But it will think, it could. All the file or directory related libc calls will return success - but actually without doing anything.

posted about 9 hours ago

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peterh‭

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