BUILD and WORKSPACE files not captured by data

Description of the problem:

I want to write some tests for the bazel-to-cmake project, and for that i need to grab some BUILD and WORKSPACE files as input testdata. I guess for obvious reasons, some special filenames are excluded, because usually no one needs them. But in this case i do, and not even naming them helps:

py_test(
    name = "test1",
    srcs = ["test1.py"],
    data = glob([
        "input/BUILD",
        "input/WORKSPACE",
        "expected/*",
    ]),
)

everything within the expected directory is caught and visible in *.runfiles.

Bugs: what’s the simplest, easiest way to reproduce this bug? Please provide a minimal example if possible.

git clone [e-mail]:blackliner/bazel-to-cmake.git
cd bazel-to-cmake
git reset --hard 8bfb4ced3e599f578f8c6e0a8c29966f8c6e5a9f
bazel test ... --test_output=all

see error message: FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'input/'

What operating system are you running Bazel on?

Ubuntu 18.04@WSL2 on Windows10

What’s the output of bazel info release?

release 1.2.1

[iirina]

Hi @blackliner, I took a look at your fork and the test you’re trying to write. Here’s what I found was not exactly correct in your BUILD files.

• the use of glob() shouldn’t include the BUILD and WORKSPACE files because in this case they are targets, not regular files.
• the input/BUILD file must export WORKSPACE and have the proper package visibility so it can be read from //test/test1

Here’s how I rewrote them:

//test/test1/BUILD

py_test(
    name = "test1",
    srcs = ["test1.py"],
    data = ["//test/test1/input:BUILD", "//test/test1/input:WORKSPACE",] 
             + glob(["expected/*"]),
)

//test/test1/input/BUILD

package(default_visibility = ["//visibility:public"])
exports_files(["WORKSPACE"])

cc_library(name = "main",
           srcs = ["main.h"])

The test still fails because you’re trying to access test/test1/input/test which doesn’t exist, in the sense that it’s not a declared dependency on your test. How is this file created? Can you check it in and declare it as a data dependency which gets rewritten for every test?

[blackliner]

If you want the BUILD and WORKSPACE files to not be treated specially by Bazel, you’ll need to rename them, since Bazel uses filenames to determine what files are special to it.

That was what i wanted to find out: how to de-specialize those two files. If that is not possible, workarounds are always a thing of course.

Thanks, can be kept closed.