Bazel package building & fetching rules

Bazel rules for packaging and fetching (for Debian and other distribution channels).

Use rules-pkg-discuss@googlegroups.com for discussion.

Travis CI

Basic Rules

Package Building Rules

• pkg - Rules for building packages of various types.

WORKSPACE Rules

• deb_packages - fetch deb files from Debain style mirror servers

Helper tools

• update_deb_packages - update the hash and path of files mentioned in deb_packages rules

Background

These rules originated in the distroless project as well as discussions about the goal of that project and are intended as a way to retrieve bundled software packages from various places.

The initial scope is currently targeting Debian style distributions, because the Bazel docker rules allow optional deb and tar files to be included in their container images. That work was done in December 2017.

We are currently (June 2019) in the process of migrating the Bazel packaging rules from Bazel to this repo. Tracking issue: bazelbuild/bazel#8489.

Plan

• DONE: slight refactor and fixup of existing package fetching rules.
• DONE: copy rules from https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/tools/build_defs/pkg.
• DONE: refactor this repo so that package fetching rules have distinct WORKSPACE requirements.
• DONE: get them working
• integrated with federation CI.
• migrate rules shipped with Bazel to this rule set.
• migrate Bazel distribution packaging to use this rule set.
• innovate wildly.

The last 4 steps may overlap in time.