Bazel Release Model & Rules Compatibility

[Yun Peng]

Dear Bazel users and developers,

Bazel has moved to the LTS release model in late 2020, we have already shipped three LTS releases - Bazel 4, 5, 6. 

In practice, there are a few details that have deviated from the original proposal, like the release timeline and cherry-pick policies.

We are trying to clarify and update our release policies and give rules authors best practices for maintaining compatibility with multiple Bazel LTS versions.

Please check the proposals in this doc and feel free to comment!

Cheers,

Yun

[Xudong Yang]

For one thing, Chrome is user-facing software and Bazel is developer infrastructure. There might be more nuances, but for the most part, Chrome doesn't have as many promises regarding backwards-incompatible changes as Bazel. When Bazel makes an incompatible change, ruleset authors need to deal with a new complexity, and end users need to update their code. With Chrome, people will just complain a bit because things changed, but nothing really _breaks_.

On Thu, Mar 9, 2023 at 9:58 PM Jay Bazuzi <j...@bazuzi.com> wrote:

I wish for the Chrome release model, which I summarize as:

- version numbers are integers. No major/minor/patch.

- each month, a new version

- for the majority of users, everyone is on the latest version of Chrome or will be in the next few days

- compatible with all existing inputs (sites)

Chrome has orders of magnitude more installations, and even more web sites that it continues to work with, and is able to accomplish the above. 

There's probably some reason that this would be way harder for Bazel to accomplish, which I'm not aware of.

-J

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