Because using bazel doesn't have to break your normal tools. bzlcompat queries
bazel for all external dependencies of your codebase, and creates a symlink farm
so your normal tools can find/use them.
(N.B.: currently bzlcompat only supports Go)
Download binaries from releases, or build it yourself following the instructions in the Development section below.
Add vendor/ to .bazelignore in the top-level of your workspace.
Run bzlcompat inside a bazel workspace. It will query bazel, and
create a symlink farm under vendor/ for all external go dependencies.
To build bzlcompat yourself, install these dependencies:
sudo apt-get install curl protobuf-compiler
go get -u github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go
and then run make proto. This will download build.proto from the bazel
project, and generate build.pb.go in bzl/bzlpb. This is used for
bzlcompat to understand the output of bazel query.
After that, go build will give you a bzlcompat binary, which you can copy to
wherever you need it to go.