bazel-team team mailing list archive

[Olek Wojnar <olek@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Dec 25, 2020, 08:56 Julian Gilbey <jdg@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Bazel team,
>

Hi Julian,

A package I maintain (anki) has recently switched to using the Bazel
> build system.


Cool. It's a very nice build system.

I don't know yet how to modify their build process to
> be able to build a Debian package, but before I get even that far, I
> see that there is a bazel-bootstrap package in Debian but not a full
> bazel package.
>
> Is there any intention to have one, or is the bootstrap version
> enough?


We're working on getting the whole build system in Debian.[1]
Unfortunately, I'm doing the majority of the packaging myself and life has
been a little busy recently. :(

There are 8 component packages that I still need to file RFP bugs for but
at least five of them will be trivial to package. The actual bazel package
will also be fairly simple once all 8 supporting components are packaged.
I'm hopeful that I can get that all in before the freeze but we'll see.

  I know almost nothing about bazel yet, but it would be useful
> to know this before I get much deeper into things.


The bigger issue for Debian packaging is that Bazel upstream does not (yet)
have a dynamic dependency resolution feature (i.e. we can't automatically
direct Bazel to use Debian's version of libraries instead of downloading
them from the Internet).

That's not a showstopper for Debian packaging, but it'll make it
complicated until we get that feature implemented. If your package has
relatively few dependencies, it may be reasonable to patch that behavior
in. If anki is very complicated, that may be overwhelming. (I gave up on
trying to do that with grpc-java, which is very complicated and has tons of
dependencies) If you have a link to the Bazel packaging, I'm happy to take
a look and give you my opinion.

-Olek

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/bazel-team/meta/-/wikis/Workplan-Part-2