The best tool for the Bazel job might be older than you

Engineering often relies on tribal knowledge, where professionals adhere to familiar languages and technologies, influenced by their specific community's ideas and opinions. Bazel, a cross-language build tool, facilitates the exchange of ideas across these communities, advocating for the integration of older, stable technologies that form the foundation for many modern tools. The article highlights the mtree format, introduced in 4.3BSD-Reno in 1990, as a textual format that describes filesystem objects, useful for creating reproducible builds in systems like Bazel. The mtree format allows for the description of filesystem structures, permissions, and symlinks, making it valuable for composing tools and Docker images, with utilities like BSD tar offering reproducible archiving solutions. The piece underscores the importance of recognizing the value of older tools in solving contemporary problems, suggesting that often the best solutions are those that have long been established, rather than the latest technological trends.