Release 8.5.1rc2 (2026-01-07)

Bazel 8.5.1 is a patch LTS release. It is fully backward compatible with Bazel 8.0 and contains selected changes by the Bazel community and Google engineers.

Configurability

• Update skyframe error checking in case the second skyframe lookup in ToolchainTypeUtils is incomplete. (#28027)
• Fixed an issue where coverage causes conflicting actions to be generated for the repo mapping manifest file. (#28116, #28181)

External Dependencies

• Fixed a crash when mixing use_repo_rule and --inject_repository (#27995)
• Fixed a "permission denied" issue with the repository download cache when using --experimental_repository_cache_hardlinks. (#28161)

Local Execution

• Fix two incorrect usages of SkyframeLookupResult (#27994)

Remote Execution

• Add option to continue with local execution if remote cache is unavailable (#27996)

Refer to the full list of commits for more details.

Acknowledgements:

This release contains contributions from people at Google, as well as Fabian Meumertzheim, John Cater, and Zhongpeng Lin.

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