When a giant project already has a folder called external in the root folder

[YongZhao12]

The external folder already contains some git repos.

I followed the README.md, and I am not sure whether I did everything correctly. I used WORKSPACE, so I adapted accordingly in First step. From what I understand, in Second Step, I just run my bazel build command to build my target. My build succeeded, but I found no compile_commands.json is generated.

So I tried to run path 1 of the four common paths to see what happens. I got an error complaining external folder is not a link.

In this case, do I have a path forward except changing the folder name?

I tried changing the folder name, and it turned out that I came to other tricky bugs, which doesn't seem to be promising.

I also tried to comment out _ensure_external_workspaces_link_exists() in main() of refresh.template.py, then I got a error like the below

in _get_bazel_version
bazel_version_process = subprocess.run(
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "internal/python3.11/subprocess.py", line 571, in run
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['bazel', 'version']' returned non-zero exit status 1.

However "bazel version" succeeds when I run it separately.

Thank you for any input.

[cpsauer]

Hi Yong Zhao! Thanks for giving the tool a whirl--sorry this one doesn't work out of the box.

Unfortunately, bazel has some hardcoded edges cases around having an external subfolder, since that's where it stashes external dependencies when it's compiling. It's likely to cause you all kinds pain if you're try to build code from inside of there... We also have to match their folder structure--hence creating the external symlink.

Lots more details in #30 (comment) if you want them, but I think the best move (both for this tool and for bazel in general) is going to end up being renaming that folder and avoiding all the subtle collisions :/

Sorry to not have something better for you. Wishing you happy coding!
Chris