Google eventually solved this issue by introducing a "strict transitive dependency mode" in Blaze. In this mode, Blaze detects whether a target tries to reference a symbol without depending on it directly and, if so, fails with an error and a shell command that can be used to automatically insert the dependency. Rolling this change out across Google’s entire codebase and refactoring every one of our millions of build targets to explicitly list their dependencies was a multiyear effort, but it was well worth it. Our builds are now much faster given that targets have fewer unnecessary dependencies,6 and engineers are empowered to remove dependencies they don’t need without worrying about breaking targets that depend on them.
-As usual, enforcing strict transitive dependencies involved a trade-off. It made build files more verbose, as frequently used libraries now need to be listed explicitly in many places rather than pulled in incidentally, and engineers needed to spend more effort adding dependencies to BUILD files. We’ve since developed tools that reduce this toil by automatically detecting many missing dependencies and adding them to a BUILD files without any developer intervention. But even without such tools, we’ve found the trade-off to be well worth it as the codebase scales: explicitly adding a dependency to BUILD file is a one-time cost, but dealing with implicit transitive dependencies can cause ongoing problems as long as the build target exists. Bazel enforces strict transitive dependencies on Java code by default.
+As usual, enforcing strict transitive dependencies involved a trade-off. It made build files more verbose, as frequently used libraries now need to be listed explicitly in many places rather than pulled in incidentally, and engineers needed to spend more effort adding dependencies to BUILD files. We’ve since developed tools that reduce this toil by automatically detecting many missing dependencies and adding them to BUILD files without any developer intervention. But even without such tools, we’ve found the trade-off to be well worth it as the codebase scales: explicitly adding a dependency to the BUILD file is a one-time cost, but dealing with implicit transitive dependencies can cause ongoing problems as long as the build target exists. Bazel enforces strict transitive dependencies on Java code by default.