The setup instructions for almost [1] every [2] major [3] rule set [4] only provide one (GitHub) url in the Starlark blob you're supposed to copy and paste, so hard to blame users here.

[1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_jvm_external/releases/ta...

[2] https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python/releases/tag/0.17...

[3] https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_java/releases/tag/5.4.0

[4] https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_scala

I agree. The Bazel developers failed in their leadership.

From a distro maintainer perspective every project that is only buildable with bazel is an absolute nightmare.

I created https://gist.github.com/jart/082b1078a065b79949508bbe1b7d8ef... to solve that, by turning bazel projects into makefiles. The problem is the bazel team has broken the apis that make it possible so many times since then because they reacted very negatively to the idea.

They did where applicable but i know that not all of them had multiple

Well now they know why it's so important. https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/commit/ed7ced0018dc5c5eb...