Bazel shows bogus WARNING for the rc files, if they are symlinks.

[PiotrSikora]

Description of the problem / feature request:

Bazel shows bogus WARNING for the rc files, if they are symlinks:

WARNING: The following rc files are no longer being read, please transfer their contents or import their path into one of the standard rc files:
/tmp/workspace/.bazelrc

But the rc file is correctly processed, as seen in the reproduction below.

Note that this is new in 0.19rc6 and there is no warning in 0.18.

Bugs: what's the simplest, easiest way to reproduce this bug? Please provide a minimal example if possible.

mkdir -p /tmp/workspace/tools
cd /tmp/workspace
touch WORKSPACE
touch BUILD
echo "build:test --copt=-DTEST" > tools/bazel.rc
ln -s tools/bazel.rc .bazelrc
bazel build --config=test :all

WARNING: The following rc files are no longer being read, please transfer their contents or import their path into one of the standard rc files:
/tmp/workspace/.bazelrc
Starting local Bazel server and connecting to it...
INFO: Analysed 0 targets (3 packages loaded, 0 targets configured).
INFO: Found 0 targets...
INFO: Elapsed time: 1.298s, Critical Path: 0.02s, Remote (0.00% of the time): [queue: 0.00%, setup: 0.00%, process: 0.00%]
INFO: 0 processes.
INFO: Build completed successfully, 1 total action

What operating system are you running Bazel on?

Linux.

What's the output of bazel info release?

release 0.19.0rc6

Any other information, logs, or outputs that you want to share?

Backstory (mostly irrelevant to the actual issue):

The .bazelrc symlink to tools/bazel.rc was added to ease the migration instead of import %workspace%/tools/bazel.rc suggested in #6319, since we have projects (e.g. https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy-filter-example) importing the main project (https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy) as a submodule and linking to its tools/bazel.rc, so import breaks, because workspace-relative location changes.

[PiotrSikora]

cc @katre, since this is new in 0.19 (#6116), but probably not a release blocker.

[katre]

This is a small enough use-case that I don't want to risk a breakage due to cherrypick. We should try and address it for 0.20, however.

[baskus]

I'm getting the same error message for non-symlinks on Windows with Bazel 0.19.0:

D:\src\codebase>bazel build //...
WARNING: The following rc files are no longer being read, please transfer their contents or import their path into one of the standard rc files:
d:\src\codebase/.bazelrc

[Xjs]

Same as @baskus. Can somebody please confirm this is not the intended behaviour?

[katre]

Assigning to @dslomov to decide if this is a blocker for 0.20

[jin]

/sub, this is causing confusing issues on the Mac too. The system_rc is /etc/bazel.bazelrc on the Mac, but /etc is a symlink to /private/etc. This results in confusing warning messages like:

$ cat /etc/bazel.bazelrc
build --jobs=4
$ bazel version
WARNING: The following rc files are no longer being read, please transfer
their contents or import their path into one of the standard rc files:
/etc/bazel.bazelrc

[laszlocsomor]

Thanks @excitoon for linking to #6138! That might indeed be the same issue.

Someone with a Mac at hand, could you please Bazel built at e9a9085 and see if that commit fixes this issue? Oh wait, never mind, it happens on Linux too I see.

[laszlocsomor]

Confirming that e9a9085 fixes this issue too, so I'll say this is a duplicate of #6138.