Please – A cross-language build system

Re:Please – A cross-language build system by rhencke on Monday November 30, 2020 @04:39PM (#25259358)

Here's what I mean:

    genrule(name = "oops", cmd = "date > $@", outs = ["oops.txt"])

This is admittedly contrived, but sadly not unrealistic.

Again, I am not picking on Bazel here. Correct builds are difficult enough to get right even when everyone involved wants to keep the build correct! But, the reality is that a lot of real-world build conditions can be downright hostile. (did you know that ext4 vs xfs can change the order JARs in the same directory are loaded off the classpath? I wish I didn't!)

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Re:Please – A cross-language build system by tomlu on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @08:44PM (#25354355)

Yeah fair point. At Google a lot of these non-deterministic rules are either banned through "date" just not existing on remote execution machines, or through determinism tests that ensure rules behave. Maybe in real-life scenarios it's not as easy as I claim, as you suggest.

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