Get ready for BazelCon 2020

With only 24 hours to go, BazelCon 2020 is shaping up to be a much anticipated gathering for the Bazel community and broader Build ecosystem. With over 1000 attendees, presentations by Googlers, as well as talks from industry Build leaders from Twitter, Dropbox, Uber, Pinterest, GrabTaxi, and more, we hope BazelCon 2020 will provide an opportunity for knowledge sharing, networking, and community building.

I am very excited by the keynote announcements, the migration stories at Twitter, Pinterest, and CarGurus, as well as technical deep dives on Bazel persistent workers, incompatible target skipping, migrating from Gradle to Bazel, and more. The “sold out” Birds of a Feather sessions and the Live Q&A with the Bazel team will bring the community together to discuss design docs, look at landings, and provide feedback on the direction of Bazel and the entire ecosystem.

We are also pleased to announce that, starting with the next major release (4.0), Bazel will support Long Term Support (LTS) releases as well as regular Rolling releases.

Some benefits of this new release cadence are:
  • Bazel will release stable, supported LTS releases on a predictable schedule with a long window without breaking changes
  • Bazel contributors / rules owners can prepare to support future LTS releases via rolling releases.
  • Bazel users can choose the release cadence that works best for them, since we will offer both LTS releases and rolling releases.
Long Term Support (LTS) releases:
  • We will create an LTS release every ~9 months => new LTS release branch, increment major version number.
  • Each LTS release will include all new features, bug fixes and (breaking) changes since the last major version.
  • Bazel will actively support each LTS branch for 9 months with critical bug fixes, but no new features.
  • Thereafter, Bazel will provide maintenance for two additional years with only security and OS compatibility fixes.
  • Bazel Federation reboot: Bazel will provide strong guidance about the ruleset versions that should be used with each Bazel release so that each user will not have to manage interoperability themselves.
Make sure that you register at http://goo.gle/bazelcon to be a part of the excitement of the premier build conference!

See you all at BazelCon 2020!

By Joe Hicks and the entire Bazel Team at Google