configure: error: lib_i_don’t_care_about.so not found.

I work on Bazel, so I don’t usually get to see it from a user’s point of view. However, yesterday I added seven new projects to Bazel’s continuous integration, all of which promptly broke. I started cloning them and trying to fix them.

These projects were various user-contributed rules for Bazel: rules for building Go, .NET, AppEngine, and more. I had never built any code in most of these languages (Rust? Sass? D?) However, using Bazel, I could build and debug each of the projects without installing any prerequisites or copying libraries to certain places on my machine. Bazel handled downloading and configuring all of the libraries and tools that I needed. And now my patches are starting to get merged and the go rules, at least, are green! One down, six to go.