Olek Wojnar, Debian Developer, reached out to the Bazel team about packaging and distributing Bazel on Debian (and other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu) in service of delivering Tensorflow Machine Learning functionality for COVID-19 researchers.
Bazel is a tool that automates software builds and tests. TensorFlow is an open-source end-to-end platform for creating Machine Learning applications.
I’m working with the Debian Med team right now to get some much-needed software packaged and available for users in the medical community to help with the COVID-19 pandemic. At least one of the packages we desperately need requires Bazel to build. Clearly this is an unusual and very critical situation. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that lives may literally depend on us getting better tools to the medical professionals out there, and quickly. The entire international community would be extraordinarily grateful if Google and the Bazelbuild team could prioritize helping with this!
He has been also working to help these scientists by packaging some software for easy installation on Linux.
The Bazel team jumped in to help Olek and the COVID-19 research community. Yun Peng from Google with Olek Wojnar led the team of Bazel and Debian volunteers to move the project forward. The joint effort between Debian and Google certainly has produced some great results. For example including packaging the Bazel bootstrap variant in 6 months.
As a result the extended Google team continues to work with Debian. The next step is packaging and distributing Tensorflow on Debian and other Linux distributions.
