Description
Users of bazel-distribution, such as TypeDB, depend on the fact that tar.gz assembly works with long filenames. Older versions of rules_pkg have an issue that prevents tar.gz assembly from working with long filenames, however, a patch implemented in bazel-distribution fixes that problem.
The problem with using a patch to solve this problem is that it is very fragile for a commonly used dependency such as rules_pkg. If another dependency that transitively depends on rules_pkg, such as rules_docker, is loaded first, then we end up loading an unpatched version of rules_pkg into our workspace, which brings back the long filename issue. We have encountered this problem recently in TypeDB (see typedb/typedb#6644).
Upgrading rules_pkg directly is not possible because of stardoc not working with more recent versions of rules_pkg. Similar issue was encountered in #251.
Activity