Bazel in Debian [fwd: Google Press Release]

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

FYI (it's something we have discussed on list in the past, as a
requirement to ease distribution of Beancount 3.x to users)

----- Forwarded message from Olek Wojnar <ol...@debian.org> -----

Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2021 18:43:19 -0500
From: Olek Wojnar <ol...@debian.org>
To: debian-p...@lists.debian.org
Cc: Debian Bazel Packaging Team <bazel...@lists.launchpad.net>, "Michael R.
Crusoe" <cru...@debian.org>
Subject: Google Press Release
Message-ID: <CAJj0crTFOpzoUVdWrcdxj6ZSBW=BJ=j4DCGG7bT1...@mail.gmail.com>
Resent-From: debian-p...@lists.debian.org

Hello Publicity Team,

Here's the press release I mentioned the other day. [1] Also, here's the
link to the talk I did at the Google Open Source Live (online)
conference.[2] Not my best performance but good info about some recent
packaging efforts in Debian.

Please let me know if you'd like any additional information.

-Olek

[1] https://blog.bazel.build/2021/03/04/bazel-debian-packaging.html
[2]
https://opensourcelive.withgoogle.com/events/bazel?talk=debian-ubuntu-packaging

----- End forwarded message -----

--
Stefano Zacchiroli . za...@upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader & OSI Board Director . . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »

[Daniele Nicolodi]

Hi Stefano,

this is a good new. However, the issues with Bazel is not only that it
requires a team of Google engineers to package it for Debian, but also
for using it, even for a seemingly not too complex package as Benacount:
the Beancount's Bazel build definition is not working on macOS, and it
cannot work on Windows (it uses the native autotools build for some of
the dependencies, without AFAIK a way to use these dependencies from
external sources, this does not make it easy to use Bazel to build
distribution packages).

I found much more rewarding to work on a Meson build definition rather
than debugging this. It only took a few hours to write it, including
writing Meson build definitions for most of the dependencies. This work
can be found here: https://github.com/beancount/beancount/pull/612

It supports out of the box building with dependencies from the OS or
built as part of the same build. It is tested and working on macOS and
GNU/Linux. The only thing that is not supported but is done by Bazel, is
building in an environment that does not have Bison: Bison is byzantine
enough that I gave up trying to write a Meson build definition for it.

I haven't tried it on Windows, but in principle it should work just fine
there too, once you get Bison (I think it exist pre-built for Windows
somewhere out there).

I am working to be able to package that into a Python sdist and wheels
that can be uploaded to PyPI. However, as of now, the c++ code in
Beancount is not hooked up yet, thus this is progressing with very low
priority.

Cheers,
Dan