[blueblob]

I used a M1 Mac to try to build tensorflow and tensorflow-text and it is very untrue that everything is guaranteed to build on other machines with no additional setup.

The parenthesized comment is funnier to me because I had to download a specific bazel version to build.

[ajconway]

That is true, Bazel itself is still evolving, and there have been breaking changes between versions. Sometimes the required version number is placed in a .bazelversion file, which makes Bazelisk your top-level dependency.

I'd expect Tensorflow to have some non-hermetic build actions, but if choosing a specific Bazel version was the only thing that was required to build it, that's awesome!

[blueblob]

It was definitely not the only thing that was required to build, but that may be as much Apple's fault as bazel's.

[jvolkman]

> The parenthesized comment is funnier to me because I had to download a specific bazel version to build.

If you use bazelisk to provide your `bazel` command, it'll download the appropriate Bazel version for the repo you're trying to build.

https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk

[dmitriid]

So, more tools on top of your tools. And this couldn't be a part of bazel proper for the dame reason MS built a separate tool to discover paths for their tools: overengineering