bazel-bin hosted python process seemingly can't find its hosting zip file

Question

I am trying to get a TensorFlow example (textsum) to run, and the readme.md specifies to use bazel to do the training. Ok, I dutifully installed chocolaty and then bazel, and then bazel ran and created the build files successfully. So bazel seems to work.

However when I got to the train step - also orchestrated by bazel - it choked with an IOError message that I don't really understand and can't find much information about.

Here it is:

UXIE+mike@uxie  /d/tensorflow/models
$ bazel-bin/textsum/seq2seq_attention     --mode=train     --article_key=article     --abstract_key=abstract     
--data_path=data/training-*     --vocab_path=data/vocab     --log_root=textsum/log_root     --train_dir=textsum/log_root/train
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python27\lib\runpy.py", line 174, in _run_module_as_main
    "__main__", fname, loader, pkg_name)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\runpy.py", line 72, in _run_code
    exec code in run_globals
  File "bazel-bin\textsum\seq2seq_attention\__main__.py", line 168, in <module>
  File "bazel-bin\textsum\seq2seq_attention\__main__.py", line 115, in Main
  File "bazel-bin\textsum\seq2seq_attention\__main__.py", line 98, in CreateModuleSpace
  File "C:\Python27\lib\zipfile.py", line 756, in __init__
    self.fp = open(file, modeDict[mode])
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '\\\\?\\bazel-bin\\textsum\\seq2seq_attention'

I am running this on Windows 10 in a bash shell (have tried a couple - same results everytime) and it is clearly successfully starting the python code contained in the seq2set_attention zip file (see the 2nd line that invokes that file).

However looking at the error dump it seems to get confused and suddenly it can't find that zip file anymore (see the last line).

So a few questions:

• I don't remember seeing that \\\\?\\ prefix before. Googling for that string didn't help. I would like to know what it means exactly.
• Why can't the executable suddenly not find the zip file it is hosted in? (if that is indeed what is happening)
• Finally if you have an idea of what configuration step I might have missed, I would be grateful for any hints.

Answer 1

This is a bug in Bazel 0.4.5, see https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/2708

You can build Bazel from HEAD or upgrade it to 0.5.0 release candidate to fix this.

choco install bazel --version 0.5.0-rc6