The symlink to exec root seems to be named incorrectly

Description of the problem / feature request:

According to this documentation: https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/output_directories.html, the symlink to exec root should be named bazel-<workspace-name>, but in practice it’s named bazel-<containing-dir-name>, which may be different.

For example, if I have a WORKSPACE file with this:

workspace(name = "foo")

contained in directory named bar, then inside bar Bazel creates bazel-bar, not bazel-foo as it should.

This is inconvenient sometimes because I don’t see how to get the name of containing directory (bar), while workspace name (foo) is available from ctx.

What operating system are you running Bazel on?

NixOS:

• system: "x86_64-linux"
• host os: Linux 4.14.48, NixOS, 18.09pre142796.4b649a99d84 (Jellyfish)
• multi-user?: yes
• sandbox: no
• version: nix-env (Nix) 2.1pre6148_a4aac7f
• channels(root): "nixos-18.09pre142796.4b649a99d84" warning: Nix search path entry ‘/home/mark/.nix-defexpr/channels’ does not exist, ignoring
• nixpkgs: /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos

What’s the output of bazel info release?

release 0.12.0- (@non-git)

If bazel info release returns “development version” or “(@non-git)”, tell us how you built Bazel.

Got it from nix.

Have you found anything relevant by searching the web?

No.

Any other information, logs, or outputs that you want to share?

No.

[janakdr]

Ok, thanks. Given the issue with bazel clean that I highlighted earlier, I think that our first effort would be to enable bazel clean to aggressively delete all symlinks into the output base that start with bazel-, even if they do not match the expected suffix. That would fix your immediate pain point, I think, and then open up the option for us to change bazel’s behavior to actually match the documentation, although I could see us going either way on that (it’s possible that some users have workflows built around the directory name at this point). I filed #11980 for the behavior change. https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/11980I don’t know how quickly we’ll be able to get this done, though. If you think that you or someone else would be interested in contributing to Bazel by fixing this, that would be great. It would also help for you or other people to let us know how big a pain point this is, so we can understand how to prioritize properly.

[blackliner]

In a perfect world i would want the caching from the host to be reused inside docker, i guess. But yes, leaving out this directory would invalidate the symlinks and thus prevent bazel from going crazy.