In order to add our repository to the Bazel Central Registry, we cannot have any patches. So says smart Bazel person, @mering.

The one offending patch is for googleapis: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-cpp/blob/main/bazel/googleapis.modules.patch

#14771 removed half of the patch. We balked at accepting the PR though because we did not love that we would have less control over the googleapis SHA update.

However, when we frame the trade-off like this, it seems like the PR is a net positive:
Con:

• updating googleapis SHA takes up to a day and is out of our control
  Pro:
• google-cloud-cpp can be added to BCR

Note that we should still be able to pin googleapis to any commit in our repo. We would just have to make sure that commit is on BCR first.

The other half of the patch is the system_includes bit. I don't know exactly what changes. If it is only about suppressing warnings, we were given the following tip:

We are using the following setting in our .bazelrc to hide warnings from external dependencies:

# Avoid warnings from third-party deps that we don't control.
build --per_file_copt=external/.*@-Wno-everything