plans for the local WORKSPACE?

[jmhodges]

The rules_go codebase is currently being tested with bazel 7 which supports bzlmod out of the box. A fair number of the dependencies in WORKSPACE are out of date (see #4500 for one breakage from that) and WORKSPACE dep upgrades are not easily automatable. Bazel 9 is a few months away and will be dropping support for WORKSPACE entirely.

When is the time to remove the WORKSPACE in the rules_go repo? Is there interest in bringing WORKSPACE deps up to date?

[fmeum]

Thanks for giving the macOS 26 issue, I ran into that one myself.

Bazel 9.0.0rc1 is out now, which makes me think that we should update to Bazel 8 now and drop the WORKSPACE setup for rules_go devs. We could keep the WORKSPACE integration tests running for now so that we have some coverage for these setups left.

cc @linzhp @jayconrod @tyler-french

[jayconrod]

+1 to what @fmeum said. I think we should switch primarily to MODULE.bazel. I expect we'll need to support users in WORKSPACE mode for another year or so, so we should keep some test configurations working and sync go_rules_dependencies with what's in MODULE.bazel (minus any dev dependencies).