AGENTS.md calls Bazel the "Production/CI" build path; no CI runs it and it cannot compile the current tree

[avrabe]

Measured

$ sed -n '145p;167p' AGENTS.md
#### Cargo (Development)
#### Bazel (Production/CI)

$ grep -rl "bazel" .github/workflows/ | wc -l
0

Bazel is documented as the production path and is run by nothing. That alone is a claim/behaviour gap, but it has gone further: the build files have drifted out of buildability while unwatched.

meld-core/BUILD.bazel globs all of src/**/*.rs and declares nine deps. Two crates the globbed sources use are absent from that list:

$ grep -cE 'petgraph|gimli' meld-core/BUILD.bazel
0
$ grep -rln 'petgraph::' meld-core/src/
meld-core/src/resource_graph.rs
$ grep -rln 'gimli::' meld-core/src/
meld-core/src/dwarf.rs

BUILD.bazel was last touched 2026-02-04; petgraph entered meld-core/Cargo.toml six weeks later. The pinned dependency set is also ~6 months stale and cannot satisfy the current manifests — MODULE.bazel.lock (dated March) has no wasmparser 0.246 while Cargo.toml requires it, and pins petgraph 0.6.5 where meld-core requires 0.8.3.

Not verified: I did not run bazel build (disk constraints on this machine). That a used extern crate missing from deps is a rustc error is mechanical rather than observed. The staleness and the missing deps are observed.

Why it matters

1. An agent or contributor following AGENTS.md's "Production/CI" instruction hits a broken build and has no way to know the document is stale.
2. rules/meld.bzl:214 points downstream rules_wasm_component consumers at //meld-cli:meld, so this is not a dormant path — it is the one other repos are wired to.
3. If it were revived as-is it would immediately start stamping a false tool version into every fused artifact (Bazel build stamps a false meld version into --version and into every fused artifact's attestation #406).

The decision this needs

Not "fix the build" by default — decide which claim is true:

• Bazel is production → fix the deps, refresh the lock, and add a CI job that builds it. Without a job it drifts again, and the next discovery is the same discovery.
• Bazel is legacy/optional → say so in AGENTS.md, and decide what rules/meld.bzl should point at.

Either is defensible. What is not defensible is a document telling people the production build is the one nothing runs.

Related

• Bazel build stamps a false meld version into --version and into every fused artifact's attestation #406 — the false version stamp, which is what a revived Bazel path would emit.
• Toolchain pins also disagree across environments (Bazel and Nix pin rustc 1.85.0; CI and release use @stable; flake.nix ships bazel_7 while .bazelversion says 8.0.0; rust-version = "1.85" is an MSRV nothing tests). Worth folding into whichever decision you take rather than filing separately.