My feeling is that, Bazel moves fast. When Heron was started, Bazel was still young (4+ years ago) and many tasks have to be done via custom rules. And when upgrading Bazel, it is often not backward compatible ..... so the effort is to fix the build, not clean it up.
However I was not in the team when the project started. Karthik, Sanjeev, Maosong, Neng, Huijun should have more information. On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 6:37 AM Nicholas Nezis <nicholas.ne...@gmail.com> wrote: > Can I start a thread for a quick discussion about Bazel? I apologize if > this is a silly question. I'm new to Bazel. > > I'm curious why there are so many custom rules defined in the Heron repo > (tools/rules). I see Bazel provided rules that we could leverage for things > like JarJar and Javadoc and Python, etc. Are there specific reasons why > there is custom logic in the Heron repo? Or was it maybe historical because > the Bazel provided resources didn't exist at the time? I was looking at > upgrading our use of Bazel to 1.X. Upgrading our custom logic seem harder > than upgrading a version of a Bazel provided rules dependency. > > Thanks, > Nick >
