Bazel vs. CMake build targets?

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Rasmus

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Feb 16, 2021, 10:43:14 PM2/16/21

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I am seeing quite a difference in what is produced when building with Bazel vs. CMake and I am wondering if Bazel is not intended to be a general-purpose build mechanism for non-Bazel projects? In my case I am packaging things up in RPMs and am having to do some gymnastics trying to use Bazel in that context.

For example, with CMake there is a short list of public libraries built:

https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/CMakeLists.txt#L1155-L1162

including libgpr.

With Bazel, there is no such short list. It just builds everything and throws it in bazel-bin and it doesn't even build a libgpr. Instead it is named libgpr_base which means that you can't compile the bundled PHP extension against a Bazel-built grpc because it is expecting to find gpr_now() in libgpr as per:

https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/src/php/ext/grpc/config.m4#L63

The documentation states that "Bazel is the primary build system for gRPC C++ and if you're comfortable with using bazel, we can certainly recommend it. Using bazel will give you the best developer experience as well as faster and cleaner builds." but I am having trouble finding this cleanliness. It feels like I have overlooked some sort of "bazel run :install" mechanism to install the public binaries, libraries and headers to a target prefix.