foreign_cc in bazel-contrib seem to be abandoned, next steps

[Mike Krinkin]

Hello Bazel Contrib,

I found this address on https://bazel-contrib.github.io/SIG-rules-authors/ and reachin out because it seems like I exhaused other options.

A few month back I sent out a PR for review with the intention to start adding support for hermetic autotools in foreign_cc repository (see https://github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_foreign_cc/pull/1434).

@fmeum reviewed the PR which was very helpful, but nobody with permissions to actually merge the PR looked at it, so it left hanging there with no progress. I left pings a few times (in the PR itself as well as the related bug) over the past several months at this point and asked on the Bazel slack channel as well, but got no response.

Looking at other PRs and issues in the same repository, it appears to me that none of them are getting attention from anybody who can actually merge to the repository. TBH, I don't even know who can merge PRs in that repository in the first place (e.g., CODEOWNERS file seem to be stale). That leads me to an unfortunate conclusion that foreign_cc repository seems to be abandoned at this point.

I'm reaching out to ask for guidance on what could be done about this situation?

Bazel foreign_cc is widely used in the field, particularly Envoy project is of interest to me personally and relies on foreign_cc Bazel rules, so it would be quite useful to revive the repository and have more people there that could review and merge PRs. Is it something that this group could assist with?

Thank you!

[Alex Eagle]

Hi, no one replied but in fact you spawned an effort to assess whether this one meets our https://bazel-contrib.github.io/SIG-rules-authors/hosting-policy.html#archive-criteria. No one is maintaining it so it's likely to be archived. There's a thread on Bazel slack about it now: https://bazelbuild.slack.com/archives/CA31HN1T3/p1759345494030089

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[Chuck Grindel]

Actually, I have heard from someone who is willing to pick up the mantle. I have not had time to finish the coordination. I expect to make more progress on this next week.

Chuck

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[Mike Krinkin]

I'm happy to help with foreign_cc given that we directly use them in Envoy, but I don't think I have enough knowledge to be a maintainer.

Looking at outcomes and the suggestion in the Slack thread mentioned above. Archiving foreign_cc and suggesting migration to native Bazel might prove a bit problematic for us.
Envoy as a project is using native Bazel wherever possible, but it has a lot of dependencies on other projects and migrating all of them to Bazel, even with the help of a conveient tool might be organizationally challenging, since we'd need to persuade the owners of the projects we depend on to migrate to Bazel.

Naturally, I might be missing something, so feel free to ignore me if what I'm saying does not make sense, but at the glance interoperability with other build systems does not seem to be easily addressed by conversion tools, even if those tools are great.

+cc phlax, as he might be interested to know where digging into foreign_cc broght me in the end.