[paulddraper]

Boost may have been a bad example, since it is a common dependency, without any sub-dependencies.

To beetwenty's point, the C++ ecosystem in general lacks the the level of support for dependency ecosystems that you find in Maven, pip, gem, npm, etc.

Bazel external dependencies are in fact a real pain point. See the 3+ year old Bazel Recursive WORKSPACE proposal. [1]

I was at the first Bazel Conf in 2017, and the external dependencies meeting was quite the row.

[1] https://bazel.build/designs/2016/09/19/recursive-ws-parsing....

[SolarNet]

I feel like that's a misunderstanding of the issue. Recursive dependencies are orthogonal to the issue of having an ecosystem of dependencies. There is a pattern for recursive dependency management (did you notice the `boost_deps` recursive dependency call?) that is currently fine for production that recursive workspaces will make better.

Also as demonstrated Boost is way easier to include in bazel than make which was the original issue under discussion.

I make a library that depends on boost, here is how you use it:

    git_repository(
        name="foo"
        ...
    )

    load("@foo//:foo/foo.bzl", "foo_deps")
    foo_deps()

magic