Release 7.3.0rc1 (2024-07-29)

Bazel 7.3.0 is a minor LTS release. It is fully backward compatible with Bazel 7.0 and contains selected changes by the Bazel community and Google engineers.

External Deps

• Bazel now supports vendoring external dependencies with Bzlmod, see https://bazel.build/external/vendor for details. (#22794)
• Added a new flag, --incompatible_use_plus_in_repo_names, which uses the plus character (+) instead of the tilde (~) in canonical repo names. This flag will be flipped to true in Bazel 8.0. (#23127)
• The extract method is now available on module_ctx. (#22825)

Performance

• Experimental support for path mapping CppCompile actions can be enabled via --modify_execution_info=CppCompile=+supports-path-mapping. For more information, refer to the discussion #22658. (#22876)
• Actions that become identical when path mapped are now deduplicated during local execution (#21043)

Refer to the full list of commits for more details.

Acknowledgements:

This release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as Cornelius Riemenschneider, David Sanderson, Fabian Meumertzheim, Honnix, Jordan Mele, Laurent Le Brun, and Simon Mavi Stewart.

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