Bzlmod: Poll for the most wanted modules in the Bazel Central Registry

[meteorcloudy]

Hello Bazel community!

Based on recent feedback on Bzlmod from different channels, while many of you are enjoying the new package manager for Bazel, there are still many users facing challenges while trying to migrate to Bzlmod. One of the main issues seems to be the limited number of dependencies available in the Bazel Central Registry.

To accelerate the Bzlmod migration process, we would like to know which dependencies you want to see in the Bazel Central Registry. Your input will help us and the community understand which rule sets and libraries are the most important ones to migrate.

Since GitHub Discussion poll doesn't support multiple choices yet, we are doing the poll in the following way:

• Please upvote the corresponding replies below for your most wanted dependencies.
• If your wanted dependency isn't listed or still missing functionalities, please create a new reply with the name of the dependency with some context.
• Please link to a module wanted issue if there is one (and feel free to create one).

If you have any further concerns or suggestions regarding Bzlmod migration, feel free to share them in the comments as well!

Thank you for your participation and support!

Useful links

If you are new to Bzlmod, here are some useful links:

• Official doc: https://bazel.build/external/overview#bzlmod
• Bzlmod Migration Guide
• Minimal examples: https://github.com/bazelbuild/examples/tree/main/bzlmod

[meteorcloudy]

protobuf

As of May 2023, the BCR does have the protobuf module providing minimal Bzlmod support with some patches applied. But there are still a lot to improve and it should be better maintained.

[chrislovecnm]

rules_kotlin is blocking this migration.

[shahms]

The version present in the BCR is too old for us (Kythe).

[sluongng]

Rules_rust

[chrislovecnm]

bazelbuild/rules_rust#1493 is tracking this issue

[csmulhern]

rules_rust currently has no maintainer with Bzlmod experience. If anyone could help with contributions / reviews, that would be much appreciated!

[fmeum]

rules_rust currently has no maintainer with Bzlmod experience. If anyone could help with contributions / reviews, that would be much appreciated!

Happy to help with reviews, just mention me.

[csmulhern]

Will do, thanks Fabian!

[Wyverald]

I have a pair-PR-review session with @scentini tomorrow morning :)

[jsharpe]

https://github.com/grailbio/bazel-toolchain

[jsharpe]

https://github.com/jsharpe/bazel-toolchain/tree/bzlmod - I started on this some time ago but can't remember how far I got with getting this working...

[jsharpe]

bazel-contrib/toolchains_llvm#198 - this PR will eventually fix this; some help is required in getting the tests all running when bzlmod is enabled.

[fmeum]

rules_kotlin

[chrislovecnm]

bazelbuild/rules_kotlin#900 and bazelbuild/rules_kotlin#899 are the start of the work. I am not certain if these PRs will provide feature parity. Those two PRs are also quite old.

[chrislovecnm]

Do we have a status on this?

[adam-singer]

rules_proto_grpc

[jwbee]

Google benchmark

[jsharpe]

This is in at HEAD for the c++ bindings: https://github.com/google/benchmark/blob/main/MODULE.bazel with the caveat that its using an older rules_python extension API so will break in the future; this can be fairly easily fixed though when the next version of rules_python comes out.

[meteorcloudy]

Thanks to @macandy13, google benchmark is added in bazelbuild/bazel-central-registry#795

[adam-singer]

bazelbuild/rules_scala

[chrislovecnm]

bazelbuild/rules_scala#1482 is tracking this issue. No work has started as of yet.

[adam-singer]

rules_pkg

[brentleyjones]

I believe this is already on BCR?

[meteorcloudy]

Yes, @aiuto are there any functionalities that are not available with Bzlmod enabled?

[aiuto]

I have not broken out a separate module for the RPM toolchain yet.

[Vertexwahn]

Boost

[sluongng]

You might be interested in https://github.com/bazelboost/registry

[Vertexwahn]

Does it already work?

[jsharpe]

Doesn't look like it - none of the modules have versions present

[zaucy]

I've been updating https://github.com/bazelboost/registry incrementally. It's come a long way since this post. If you're interested in using it please do and report issues you have. Not every module is ready, but for my projects it's working well.

[adam-singer]

rules_go

[fmeum]

This is already on the BCR, with only a few features missing compared to WORKSPACE. See https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/docs/go/core/bzlmod.md.

[chrislovecnm]

@fmeum do you have feature parity now?

[fmeum]

Some niche features are missing, but some core features are actually more usable with Bzlmod than without. All in all, I would say this is done.

[chrislovecnm]

@fmeum do we have feature parity?

[fmeum]

Except for nogo I would say yes. Suggestions for how to model nogo with Bzlmod are very welcome.

[jsharpe]

https://github.com/pybind/pybind11_bazel

[lalten]

This one is in BCR but pybind/pybind11_bazel#66 means it will only work with non-hermetic local Python.

[junyer]

This is resolved now. :)

[Vertexwahn]

https://github.com/emscripten-core/emsdk/tree/main/bazel

[Vertexwahn]

Qt

[sluongng]

is there a rule for Qt already to add to the registry? Or is this a rules request?

[Vertexwahn]

This is a request - there are some WORKSPACE approaches in place:

• https://github.com/Vertexwahn/rules_qt6
• aabtop/rules_qt
• bbreslauer/qt-bazel-example
• justbuchanan/bazel_rules_qt
• https://github.com/kklochkov/rules_qt
  There is also som approch to build Qt from Scratch using Qt that works with Linux and Bazel already - but can currently not find the repo...
  They all lacking Bzlmod support...

[coryan]

libcurl: https://github.com/curl/curl/

[sluongng]

I don't think all modules need to have multi-platforms support from day 1.
If you could help opensource / provide Bazel setup for curl, I'm sure it will be updated overtime as folks adopt it to their needs.

[lalten]

@aiuto any progress on this one?

[Vertexwahn]

@lalten I did an experiment here to Bzmod curl 7.69.1. I simply copied https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-cpp/blob/main/bazel/curl.BUILD.

bazel build build //:curl results in:

Use --sandbox_debug to see verbose messages from the sandbox and retain the sandbox build root for debugging
In file included from lib/urldata.h:127,
from lib/strerror.h:25,
from lib/strerror.c:46:
lib/vssh/ssh.h:25:10: fatal error: curl_setup.h: No such file or directory
25 | #include "curl_setup.h"
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Vertexwahn]

@lalten Could fix the issue

[Vertexwahn]

bazelbuild/bazel-central-registry#1429

[chrislovecnm]

rules_dotnet does not yet have support.

[Vertexwahn]

https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_webtesting

[neal-codaio]

rules_jsonnet

[adam-singer]

rules_license

[chrislovecnm]

It is in the repository.

[brentleyjones]

Stardoc

[meteorcloudy]

Thanks to @fmeum, Stardoc is close bazelbuild/stardoc#141

[brentleyjones]

And now with 0.5.4 it works!

[chrislovecnm]

Are we still missing the capability for stardoc to generate bzlmod extension docs?

[Wyverald]

Are we still missing the capability for stardoc to generate bzlmod extension docs?

Yes; @tetromino has a change in flight to add that.

[tetromino]

Yes; @tetromino has a change in flight to add that.

A series of changes: one in flight + approx. 2 followups in my head.

[adam-singer]

rules_antlr

[Vertexwahn]

TensorFlow

[limdor]

glew

[limdor]

assimp

[jsharpe]

Annotation support for pip_parse extension in rules_python

[chrislovecnm]

Fixed. Next release we will have full feature parity

[chrislovecnm]

@rickeylev I think we can say that we are fully compatible with bzlmod now. Please correct me otherwise.

[rickeylev]

Yeah, I think we do.

[sluongng]

https://github.com/google/copybara would be really nice.

The repo is tightly coupled with Bazel.git so I am very curious about how such a migration could be done.
It would be nice if this could onboard Bazel CI as well to discover breakages early since I had to apply several monkey patches locally to get it to build.

[sluongng]

This might be a cool move to double the Java implementation of starlark into a separate module. Which is the shared part between bazel.git and copybara.git.

[xFile3160]

halide
tensorflow-lite
opencv
ffmpeg
node-addon-api
node-api-headers
opencl-clhpp
opencl-headers
backward-cpp

[xFile3160]

FWIW: https://github.com/xFile3160/bazel-central-registry

added:
halide
mnn
opencl-headers
opencl-hpp
node-addon-api
node-api-headers
flatbuffers (but it got added recently as well last time I checked).

[fausturs]

openssl
cyrus-sasl
curl
arrow

[photex]

Would be great to have an ispc toolchain.

[Vertexwahn]

https://github.com/Vertexwahn/rules_ispc (does not support bzlmod yet)

[photex]

Oh! Skia would be lovely. And SDL2.

[mortenmj]

jsonnet and go-jsonnet

[mortenmj]

This is done

[chris-codaio]

How does one use jsonnet via bzlmod? I can't find any documentation.