The following release notes are still in the process of being updated and cleaned up.

Release 8.5.0rc2 (2025-11-14)

Release Notes:

Configurability:

• The new ctx.configuration.short_id field provides a short identifier for the current configuration that is understood by bazel config. (#27128)
• The --module_mirrors flag now supports specifying mirrors for individual registries via the syntax --module_mirrors=<registry>=<mirror1>[,<mirror2>,...]. (#27531)

ExternalDeps:

• Module extensions can store a JSON-like Starlark object in module_ctx.extension_metadata(facts = ...) and retrieve it back in future evaluations of the extension via module_ctx.facts without any invalidation taking place. (#27296)

General:

• With the new --incompatible_eagerly_resolve_select_keys flag, the label string keys of select dicts in .bzl files are resolved relative to the containing file instead of relative to the BUILD file that ends up using the select. Use native.package_relative_label if this is not desired. (#27429)

OSS:

• The contents of source directories are now tracked for invalidation. Using glob or explicit lists of files to consume source directories is still strongly preferred, but there may be cases in which this isn't feasible (e.g. file names that aren't valid labels). (#27417)

Performance:

• Fixed an issue where genquery in external repos would evaluate labels as if they were in the main repo. (#27117)
• bazel query/cquery/aquery now supports an executables() function to find only the executable targets in a given expression (#27560)

Remote-Exec:

• The new --remote_max_concurrency_per_connection can be used to specify the maximum number of concurrent gRPC requests Bazel will issue on a single connection to the server. The default value of 100 matches the previous behavior. (#27564)

Rules-CPP:

• [Incompatible] Bazel releases that include a bundled JDK now use the system trust store for certificates by default. Set `-Djavax.... (#26935)

Acknowledgements:

This release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as bazel.build machine account, Bradley Bridges, cheister, David Sanderson, David Zbarsky, Fabian Meumertzheim, Greg, Jordan Mele, Keith Smiley, Peter Lukacs, Ruoyu Zhong, Ulrik Falklof, Wade Carpenter.

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