Upstream seems to be friendly
Time to prod them:
https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/9408
Thanks for highlighting that. It indeed seems that they will likely realize the importance of their software right now and help. Pinged. :) [1]
On Wed, Apr 8, 2020 at 10:57 PM Philipp Kern <pkern@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On 2020-04-08 19:43, Olek Wojnar wrote:
> >
> > In the meantime, I see that Bazel has an unofficial Ubuntu build [1].
> > Do you know anything about that? It seems like a good place for us to
> > start if you aren't close to a product yourself.
>
> That's the build Google provides that is built with Bazel itself, using
> a ton of vendored libraries. (Because that's how Google operates
> internally.)
Ah, ok. Good to know. Thanks. Might be better to just start with a vanilla source package then. I'm playing around with it just to see what I can get working while we wait for a reply to my ping on Bastien's GitHub issue.
> Generally the pkg_deb output[1] is not really policy-compliant and more
> built from the ground up without any Debian tooling. So the /mere
> existence/ of that package (which was there from the beginning) does not
> help the quest of getting Bazel packaged for Debian, unfortunately.
>
> Kind regards
> Philipp Kern, obviously not speaking for Google
>
> [1]
> https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/blob/f828b4c77805ad0ea6afecef798aa69d68bec8d4/scripts/packages/debian/BUILD#L69
Well that's not as encouraging as I'd hoped but still good information to have. Sounds like our best shot for getting something working in the near-term is active cooperation and support from Google. Here's hoping they support that!!
-Olek