[Bug]: ncurses uses perl from the host

[stevebarrau]

What happened?

Without perl on the host, ncurses fails to build:

Configuring include/ncurses_cfg.hin @@ncurses~//:ncurses_cfg_h failed: (Exit 127):
bash failed: error executing Genrule command (from target @@ncurses~//:ncurses_cfg_h)
/bin/bash: line 1: perl: command not found

Could we use perl from rules_perl?

CC @wep21

I would also need an hermetic version of the following IIUC:

• tic (compiled from here ?)
• infocmp (compiled from here?)
• awk

Version

Development (host) and target OS/architectures: Mac arm64, with RBE on Linux x86_64
Output of bazel --version: bazel 7.4.1
Version of relevant rules from the WORKSPACE or MODULE.bazel file: ncurses@6.4.20221231.bcr.4

How to reproduce

On linux x84_64 without perl installed:


bazel build @ncurses

Any other information?

In some private rules, we inject the perl binary in rules by doing the following:

genrule(
    name = "gen_http_common_headers",
    # srcs ...
    # outs ...
    cmd = """
PERL=$(PERL) ...
""",
    toolchains = [
        "@rules_perl//:current_toolchain",
    ],
)

(@kgreenek the above is from our proxy gen build files)