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Susan Steinman

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11:09 AM (8 hours ago) 11:09 AM

to bazel-discuss, John Field, Tobias Werth, Lukács T. Berki

Dear Bazel Community,

Skylib was originally developed to support Google projects, and over time it’s become increasingly difficult to reconcile Google and non-Google requirements. We’re aware that contributing to Skylib is often a frustrating experience. We’re not always responsive to pull requests, and even when we are, the review process can be slow. On the Google side, merging pull requests to Skylib is also time consuming and frustrating. Differences between Google’s version of Skylib and the OSS version of Skylib mean that we often need to rewrite pull requests to avoid internal breakages, and update the scripts that keep the versions in sync.

In order to mitigate this, we are putting Bazel Skylib in Google-first mode. As of July 2024, Skylib will continue to be supported and to evolve to meet the needs of Google open source and internal projects, but it will now only accept pull requests that are applicable to Google projects. As part of the effort to reduce maintenance costs, we also plan to move some functionality out of Skylib and into Bazel and related rules.

Hopefully, this will add clarity to the situation that already exists, freeing up contributors to develop forks where needed, while knowing they can rely on the existing Skylib functionality. While we believe that Skylib will continue to provide useful functionality for most current users, there are alternative Bazel libraries (e.g., bazel-lib) that you may also wish to consider.