The Bazel team has been maintaining a separate, stripped-down build of Bazel that runs with JDK 7. The 0.5.1 release will no longer provide this special version.

To address the problem of JDK 8 not being available on some machines, starting with version 0.5.0, our installer will embed a JDK by default.

If you have any concerns, please reach out to bazel-discuss@googlegroups.com.

Recap:

0.5.0:

• bazel-0.5.0-installer.sh: default version, with embedded JDK.
• bazel-0.5.0-without-jdk-installer.sh: version without embedded JDK.
• bazel-0.5.0-jdk7-installer.sh: last release compatible with JDK 7.

0.5.1:

• bazel-0.5.1-installer.sh: default version, with embedded JDK.
• bazel-0.5.1-without-jdk-installer.sh: version without embedded JDK.

Migration path:

If you are currently using the Bazel with JDK 7, then starting with version 0.5.0 you must start using the default installer.

If you are currently using the default installer and do not want to use a version with embedded JDK, then use the -without-jdk version.

Note:

Homebrew and debian packages do not contain the embedded JDK. This change only affects the shell installers.

Thanks:

Thanks everybody for bearing with all the JDK 7 related issues, including the Java team at Google, in particular Liam Miller-Cushon.

Special thanks to Philipp Wollermann who made this new installer possible.