bazel 8.0.0 removes WORKSPACE support by default

[bthomale]

Last week, Bazel 8.0.0 was released. Because I am using bazelisk (as recommended in the djinni docs) to manage bazel, it updated me to 8.0.0 automatically today, and promptly broke the djinni build.

Supposedly there is a bazel flag to re-enable workspace called --enable_workspace but I couldn't figure out how to make it work. (One piece of documentation seemed to say it only enables workspace for your dependencies and not your project? I know very little about bazel - I am a C++ / Swift programmer, sorry.)

I finally discovered that I can drop a .bazelversion file in my djinni directory, instructing bazelisk to use 7.4.1, which I have done. And that fixes the issue for me, for now.

It sounds like you guys maybe have some work to do to maintain compatibility with bazel 8.0.0 - either switch from WORKSPACE to the new thing (bzlmod, I think), or correctly specify the flags to re-enable WORKSPACE in 8 (which, I couldn't figure out)? In the meantime, I'm hoping this issue post (and the workaround I mentioned) un-sticks anyone else who is as stumped as I was today!

[bthomale]

Here is the link that the bazel error message directed me to about the problem: https://bazel.build/versions/8.0.0/external/migration

[li-feng-sc]

Thanks for reporting this!