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• if this is a bug or feature request, fill the form below as best as you can.

Description of the problem / feature request:

It would be very useful to have a command line option that works like --action_env to pass environment variables through to the compiler actions, but without invalidating the target if they are changed.

Feature requests: what underlying problem are you trying to solve with this feature?

We need this to run Bazel with the Coverity static code analysis tool. It works as a build wrapper, for example:
$ cov-build --dir cov-output-dir bazel build ...

The cov-build command sets various environment variables which need to be passed through to the compiler, but some are different for each build, such as COVERITY_TEMP which is set to a randomly named temporary directory. Without using --action_env the Coverity analysis doesn't happen; with --action_env it works but forces a full rebuild each time.

Bugs: what's the simplest, easiest way to reproduce this bug? Please provide a minimal example if possible.

n/a

What operating system are you running Bazel on?

Linux, Windows

What's the output of bazel info release?

release 0.22.0

If bazel info release returns "development version" or "(@Non-Git)", tell us how you built Bazel.

n/a

What's the output of git remote get-url origin ; git rev-parse master ; git rev-parse HEAD ?

n/a

Have you found anything relevant by searching the web?

No, I don't think many people have tried running Bazel and Coverity together.

Any other information, logs, or outputs that you want to share?

n/a