Dear Maintainer,

I see in the detailed work plan for bringing bazel into Debian mention
of bazel upstream having undertaken work to make it easier to package
and easier to use in packaging.

I started looking at xla and jax packaging which use bazel as the build
system. They need newer versions of bazel to build at all (8.7.0), and
then there is the internal integration question.

As a first step, is uploading a newer bazel possible?

Good luck with this big project!

thanks
Stuart

Hi Stuart,


Hearing that you plan to package JAX gets me really excited, as I also
think it's very useful. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to look
into it right now, but if I had the time, I'd definitely love to get
involved.


However, the reason we currently can't upgrade bazel-bootstrap to
version 8 or 9 is that the protobuf version in unstable is too old. I've
already mentioned this in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-bazel/2026/09/msg00006.html

Other developers in the same mailing list have also mentioned running
into this same issue.


Fortunately, the protobuf maintainer is still very active. His latest
reply is in the same mailing list as well:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-bazel/2026/10/msg00002.html

It seems we're waiting for abseil to undergo its transition first before
protobuf can transition, after which we can move forward. In any case, I
personally hope to upgrade straight to Bazel 9. If we go with 8, I'd
have to manually pick matching versions for bazel-rules-* all over
again. So it's much better to just upgrade everything to the latest
version together.


And forward-porting the project's build files from Bazel 7 or Bazel 8 to
Bazel 9 should also benefit upstream. I'm wondering what your thoughts
are on this.


Yours,
Paul