bazelbuild / bazelisk

A user-friendly launcher for Bazel.
Apache License 2.0
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Steps for installing Bazelisk are not new-developer friendly #571

Open armandomontanez opened 2 months ago

armandomontanez commented 2 months ago

The current instructions for installing Bazelisk are not user-friendly.

Generally, the widely expected ways to get a tool on the following platforms are:

Today, the instructions are:

Often, when I direct people to install Bazel via https://bazel.build/install, they end up directly using a release of Bazel rather than Bazelisk. I know the reason I've done this in the past is because of the lack of clarity in the installation process for Bazelisk.

Generally speaking, the recommended flows for installing Bazelisk are atypical at best, and frustrating at worst. Bazelisk should strive to make the installation experience as frictionless as possible to ensure Bazel is approachable for new developers.

jwnimmer-tri commented 2 months ago

As a step in the right direction, I think attaching Debian binary packages to the https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk/releases page would be a nice start. I opened a PR for that at https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk/pull/563.

eabase commented 1 month ago

I totally agree. Trying to use this for the very first time I find the instructions lacking. There is no way I'm gonna install choco (or scoop) when I can just run the stand-alone release installer or use winget.

At the end of the day, I still fail to see why this is needed. Long text there, but not very to the point. What is the problem Bazel, that this is trying to solve? (A use case scenario would have been enlightening.)

Then also for building, you are not saying anything on the requirements of having WiX and the unknown Make-MSI package, used in here: