bazel-team team mailing list archive

[Olek Wojnar <olek@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Adrian,

You are correct, Bazel does not (yet) build on 32-bit architectures. That
is why I disabled those builds.

On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 12:35 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <
glaubitz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> Guess you won't get much far with a build system which has such limited
> portability. But it's Google, I'm not surprised anything outside their
> own usecase doesn't really work.
>

I obviously can't speak for the upstream Bazel team, or for their corporate
sponsor, but I can give you my perspective on this. Bazel is a relatively
new build system and it is still in very heavy development. It makes sense
to me that the team would focus their initial efforts on popular 64-bit
architectures (e.g. amd64 and arm64) for which they have sufficient
in-house expertise. The beauty of FLOSS is that people with expertise in
different architectures can help enable Bazel to build, and run, correctly
there. That is why I specifically reached out to the RISC-V experts here
instead of just excluding the architecture from the list.

I'm personally very impressed with what Bazel can do even now, and I think
it has the potential to be very useful in many FLOSS projects, including
distributions such as Debian. I'm happy that Google chose to Open Source
the code instead of keeping it as an internal tool. That's a trend I would
like to see more of. So, I'm asking you to please help honor the steps that
the upstream Bazel team has taken to make their software universally
available by helping in the areas where neither they (nor the Debian
packagers) have sufficient experience.

Thanks in advance!

-Olek