Version in .bazelversion should be respected without WORKSPACE file about bazelisk HOT 5 CLOSED

We're using bzlmod and instead of a WORKSPACE file we have a WORKSPACE.bzlmod file. It was really hard to understand why .bazelversion wasn't being used. Either .bazelversion should be used without a WORKSPACE file or WORKSPACE.bzlmod should also be or this should be clearly stated in the documentation. The current state of things is quite confusing.

from bazelisk.

@philwo – I seem to have a use case for this. In my organization we use a strictly pinned version of bazel and so most of the organization has no need for a .bazelversion file. However, I would like to set for myself (e.g. in ~/.bazelversion) a default version, while still creating specific workspaces with their own version (e.g. ~/my/workspace/.bazelversion).

I can get around this with USE_BAZEL_VERSION but since it takes precedence over .bazelversion I don't have a great option to support multi-version for personal workspaces (with .bazelversion) vs shared workspaces (without .bazelversion).

From README.md:

• Otherwise, if a .bazelversion file exists in the current directory or recursively any parent directory, it will read the file and use the version specified in it.

It would be nice if at least the documentation was updated to indicate the behavior, since there is no mention of the WORKSPACE file in the README.

from bazelisk.

I think we can change the logic to check for .bazelversion files from the current working directory up to the workspace root, but I'm not really sure what the use case is.

Except for bazel help or bazel version you can't do anything without a WORKSPACE file - not even bazel info:

$ bazel info
ERROR: The 'info' command is only supported from within a workspace (below a directory having a WORKSPACE file).
See documentation at https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/build-ref.html#workspace

Could you explain a bit more why you'd need this?

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@bmuschko Friendly ping - I'm curious about your use case for this. :)

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@philwo When I opened the issue, I didn't realize that a WORKSPACE is pretty much required no matter what as I was very new to Bazel. IMHO it's not a use case. ;-)

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