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Also Bazel is very "corporate", it's not designed for projects that want to be good FOSS unix citizens.

Very telling: "common c++ use cases" https://docs.bazel.build/versions/4.2.2/cpp-use-cases.html includes pulling googletest source from the web and linking a random shared object blob. Zero mentions of pkg-config.

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The http_archive has a sha256-attribute to deal with the "random". You could add multiple urls to point to your local mirror as well. It's a way to pin external dependencies and get reproducible builds without checking in a big blob into your git. pkg-config in my experience is less reproducible and tends to pollute and be affected by system environment, unless you have some build guru who can setup chroot in your project.

Oh I didn't mean "random" as in "could change". In fact "random" was about the unspecified .so blob, not the http archive.

> pkg-config in my experience is less reproducible

But this is what I mean, you only want full reproducibility in a "corporate" environment. In a FOSS desktop environment you often specifically want to use whatever the system has.

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