Plans to forward all flags not recognized by ibazel

[ajhenry]

Would it be possible to add a flag for forwarding all flags to bazel? This way we can keep backwards compatibility, while also allowing continued allow-listing of flags that is in use today.

We've had to fork this project a few times in the past to make changes to the flags that we rely on. Notability extra_toolchains and some other optimization flags.

Proposed Solution

Add an option flag like forwardAllFlags which bypasses the allowlist of flags altogether and forwards anything that isn't recognized by ibazel

Alternatively, we could do away with the allowlist and just forward everything (but this would be breaking change)

There is a similar discussion here #530.

[chickenandpork]

@ajhenry that might work. Because the flags to bazel change, we can't easily keep up with each update. Further, bazel-watcher works across versions, so we may eventually need to track differences.

I ran into the issue that some flags don't work with query but do work with build; some of these seem silently ignored in query at/after bazel-6.5.0, but there may be others. As bazel tries to run a query before running a build, but passing-through the arguments given, this might trip us up. I think this is what the allowlist intends to catch, but doing away with it without a replacement will cripple us.

Some of us are focusing on catching up bazel-watcher to bzlmod, and updated dependencies. With getting CI green again, we're making progress, but I think bzlmod/updates (janwinkler1's work in #712) is the key path right now.

Can you share what you've had to do as a concrete example? A simple repro might both show in detail, plus ultimately allow us to convert to a test case in //internal/e2e/ if that's where we go.

[pauldraper]

This seems like a bad proposal. Better to have explicit difference between Bazel Watcher options and Bazel options.