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

Release 8.6.0rc1 (2026-02-10)

Release Notes:

Configurability:

• Reporting of cached test results can now be suppressed with --test_summary=short_uncached or --test_summary=detailed_uncached. (#28343)
• ctx.actions.symlink now accepts a target_type argument. (#28538)

ExternalDeps:

• Bazel now fails over immediately to mirror URLs if a TLS handshake error occurs. (#28459)
• The compatibility_level and max_compatibility_level attributes of module in MODULE.bazel are now no-ops. Module maintainers should stop specifying those attributes and provide clear build time error messages and actionable migration paths when making major breaking changes. (#28615)

Acknowledgements:

This release contains contributions from many people at Google, as well as Alex Novak, ashutosh0x, bazel.build machine account, Chi Wang, Christian Scott, David Ostrovsky, Fabian Meumertzheim, George Gensure, hvadehra, Jordan, Paul Tarjan, Rgis Desgroppes, Timothy Gu, Xùdōng Yáng.

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