I haven't had many issues with non-determinism when using Bazel/Blaze? Especially when you use remote execution or sandboxing it's pretty hard to avoid being hermetic.
This is admittedly contrived, but sadly not unrealistic.
Again, I am not picking on Bazel here. Correct builds are difficult enough to get right even when everyone involved wants to keep the build correct! But, the reality is that a lot of real-world build conditions can be downright hostile. (did you know that ext4 vs xfs can change the order JARs in the same directory are loaded off the classpath? I wish I didn't!)
Yeah fair point. At Google a lot of these non-deterministic rules are either banned through "date" just not existing on remote execution machines, or through determinism tests that ensure rules behave. Maybe in real-life scenarios it's not as easy as I claim, as you suggest.
