What's New in Bazel 6.0
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What's New in Bazel 6.0
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#2I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4...
I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my former company but even there I couldn't convince my colleagues - they build a monster using maven which would be more elegant in bazel but maven integration worked different than the maven algorithm at least 2 years ago...so my PoC turned into reading source code of dependency resolution algorithm in the used scala tool coursier... in the end I had to give up after patching maven issues in several projects we build upon - something nobody is willing to do I guess - to be fair I tried to incorporate Alfresco ECM which is quite an enterprise Java monster on it's own.
Also I couldn't find a good approach to use multiple git repositories almost all tutorials use a monorepo.
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#3I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…
I've been meaning to try out XMake [0]. It has caching and distributed build and seems much easier to understand than Bazel.
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#4I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…
In my experience you need a Bazel expert on the team.
When everything works it's amazing. When it doesn't or additional work is required the hope your local expert is online and willing to sort it out.
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#5I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…
Just speaking to multiple git repositories: could you use submodules for a conglomerated-monorepo?
Otherwise: you can pull in repos as bazel-file-containing additions. I forget the details, but I believe it's something like https://bazel.build/extending/repo . The troubleshooting-while-developing experience is not great though imo, I'd try submodules first.
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#6I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…
Just speaking to multiple git repositories: could you use submodules for a conglomerated-monorepo? Otherwise: you can pull in repos as bazel-file-containing additions. I forget the details, but I believe it's something like https://bazel.build/extending/repo . The troubleshooting-while-developing experience is not great though imo, I'd try submodules first.
Thanks - repository_rule looks good. So it's either git submodules to maintain updates or checksums / commits in repository_rule - I probably need to just play around with both approaches and choose the one that annoys me the least :)
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#7I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…
In my experience you need a Bazel expert on the team. When everything works it's amazing. When it doesn't or additional work is required the hope your local expert is online and willing to sort it out.
This is true for any language ecosystem or build tool, whether it's bazel, maven, unrealbuildtool, Jenkins, cmake, gradle etc.
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#8I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…
I'm not going to try to convince you to use Bazel. I think it's great, but ultimately choosing one build system or another is a big decision that involves weighing a lot of different factors, including what your coworkers are amenable to and have experience with. However I don't think Bazel is that difficult to get started with.
The Bazel docs are admittedly a bit challenging, but the easiest way to learn things when you're first getting started is to just look at other projects using Bazel and see how they do things.
Using multiple git repositories is easy, you just use the git_repository() rule which has been in Bazel since pretty much forever. Nowadays you can also use bzlmod (introduced in bazel 5.x) which is a slightly different approach to this problem. There are a bunch of rules in https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-central-registry which you can look at to see how to write your own bzlmod registries.
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#9I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…
I'm not going to try to convince you to use Bazel. I think it's great, but ultimately choosing one build system or another is a big decision that involves weighing a lot of different factors, including what your coworkers are amenable to and have experience with. However I don't think Bazel is that difficult to get started with. The Bazel docs are admittedly a bit challenging, but the easiest way to learn things when…
bzlmod looks amazing! Thank you! I don't need to be convinced but I need to sell it to my team and I must be able to solve our problems in it - imho getting it working solves 90% of annoying problems in this whole ci/cd/container mess and that's why I'd like to push for it.
Re: What's New in Bazel 6.0
#10I'm still not sure if I should go the bazel route... recently found a long good explanation why anki switched away from bazel: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/commit/5e0a761b875fff4c9e4... I'd love to have cachable builds but I wonder how much effort it takes to maintain such a setup - especially in a small team very far away from silicon valley or google were nobody saw bazel before. Would be a perfect fit for my…
Was your project built in multiple languages and tied together using Maven? Or was it just JDK languages/Java?
Tools like Bazel or Nix or are incredible for many reasons but they are, to a first approximation, very, very high-effort and complex tools that require care. It's like a racing car. You need an engineer on hand to keep the car running, and someone to drive it too. Maybe you're both of those people, but only a driver isn't enough.
They also suffer from another problem which is that most people don't care as much as you or I do. :) So to make it a slam dunk, you have to make a pretty clear case that it's not "just" 2x better, but actually 10x better. And it's actually even harder than that: it can't just be 10x better in practice, it has to appear 10x better at a glance. Like, at the window shopping phase, it needs to catch their eye. That's difficult to nail and basically impossible to do perfectly.
Personally? I'm all-in on "whole sale" build tools like this that hit many nails with one hammer. They solve a tremendous amount of issues. But they aren't always good and I can really see why they can fail to gain traction for many teams: they simply aren't necessary for them, even if they're really a lot better in many ways. I get it.