We've just released Bazel 0.21!

Backward compatibility

Before updating Bazel, you may try if anything would break with 0.21. To do so, build your code with Bazel 0.20 and the following flags:

• --incompatible_disable_sysroot_from_configuration
• --incompatible_disallow_slash_operator
• --incompatible_static_name_resolution
• --incompatible_package_name_is_a_function
• --incompatible_use_remotejdk_as_host_javabase
• --incompatible_provide_cc_toolchain_info_from_cc_toolchain_suite
• --incompatible_disable_depset_in_cc_user_flags
• --incompatible_disable_late_bound_option_defaults
• --experimental_strict_action_env

For more information about the changes, please click on the links and read the GitHub issues. Comment there if you need help.

If you use external repositories, you might first have to update the dependencies in your WORKSPACE file.

Changes for which 0.21 is a migration window are marked with GitHub label migration-0.21.

Breaking changes in the next release (0.22) are marked with GitHub label breaking-change-0.22.

Android

• We revamped our Android with Bazel tutorial. Check it out here.
• --experimental_check_desugar_deps is enabled by default. This flag rules out several types of invalid Android builds at compile-time. Note that this is incompatible with remote Android builds, so you can disable it with --noexperimental_check_desugar_deps.
• Bazel now supports Android Databinding v2. It can be enabled with --experimental_android_databinding_v2.

Apple

• XCRUNWRAPPER_LABEL is removed. If you used this value before, please use @bazel_tools//tools/objc:xcrunwrapper instead.

C++

• The --experimental_stl command line option is removed.
• cpp configuration fragment doesn't do package loading anymore. That means:
  • You can now use Bazel without a C++ toolchain (as long as you don't build C++ rules).
  • Bazel may start about 2 seconds faster than before, because it does not analyze C++ toolchain anymore when it is not needed.

Java

• --strict_android_deps and --strict_java_deps are renamed to --experimental_strict_java_deps. (The two flags used to do the same.)

Starlark

• A new incompatible flag --incompatible_strict_argument_ordering is added. This concerns a corner case in function calls. When this flag is enabled, *arg and **kwarg have to be after all other arguments.

External repositories

• repository_ctx.download and repository_ctx.download_and_extract now return a struct, instead of None.

Execution

• --genrule_strategy is deprecated in favor of --strategy=Genrule=<strategy> (for genrules) or --spawn_strategy=<strategy> (for all actions).
• Dynamic execution is now available with --experimental_spawn_scheduler. Dynamic execution allows a build action to run locally and remotely simultaneously, and Bazel picks the fastest action. This provides the best of both worlds: faster clean builds than pure local builds, and faster incremental builds than pure remote builds.

Other changes

• Our documentation is now versioned. You can see the documentation for a specific Bazel version. This is especially useful when a flag or a feature is removed.
• aquery defaults to human readable output format, use --output=proto to get the result in proto format..
• The deprecated and unmaintained Docker rules in tools/build_defs/docker are removed. Please use https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_docker instead.
• A new incompatible flag --incompatible_merge_genfiles_directory is added. When enabled, Bazel does not create a bazel-genfiles directory, and writes everything to bazel-bin instead.
• When build options change, Bazel discards the analysis cache. The changed options are now printed in the output. It is possible to control the number of options to show using --max_config_changes_to_show.
• --experimental_remote_grpc_log now also logs updateActionResult. This is the Remote Execution API call used in remote caching, so now remote caching can be debugged using the grpc log.
• The deprecated flavors of http_archive(), http_file(), git_repository(), etc. no longer respect the HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variables. Support for this was removed to prevent interference with GRPC, causing remote builds to fail. The non-deprecated flavors of these functions should work as intended.

Community

• Natan Silnitsky talked about Wix's lessons learned for successful migration to Bazel and Google Cloud Build to build their Scala codebase.
• David Stanke also did a talk: Build and test your code faster with Bazel, the cloud-accelerated build system.
• Philipp Wollermann created Bazelisk, a wrapper for Bazel that automatically picks a good version of Bazel given your current working directory.
• John Millikin started new rules for the GNU m4 macro processor, the Flex scanner generator, and the GNU Bison parser generator.

This release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as Andy Scott, Attila Oláh, Benjamin Peterson, Clint Harrison, Dave Lee, Ed Schouten, Gregor Jasny, Jamie Snape, Jerry Marino, Loo Rong Jie, Or Shachar, Sevki Hasirci, and William Chargin.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

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