How is this different to Buf BSR?

[marvin-hansen]

Ok, I've read the blog post, i read through the docs, and now I am wondering, how is this different compared to Buf BSR?

Sure it's OSS and it's work in progress, but what are the more technical differences?

I'm operating a larger mono repo (about 70 crates) build with Bazel and I am actually looking for a solution to manage Protos in a more sensible way. Obviously, distribution is not much of an issue in a mono repo, but proto composition is one area that could be better.

So I have some specific questions:

1. Does Bufrs integrates with Bazel?
   From reading the docs it is not clear to me how much the project deviates from the common Rust conventions. The CLI can be wrapped in a shell target, that's the easy part, but then what?

2. In Bazel, rules_rust actually with a prost target that generates all the Rust bindings from a bunch of Protos. Ideally you want to compose the Protos from multiple sub-packages while leaving the Prost target intact so your Rust bindings are still generated.
   From the docs, it's not so clear to me how the actual proto composition works. I mean, so I wire a bunch of crates together or some none standard packages?

3. Can you run this without a registry or some kind of /dev/null link?

Point is, in the local network the registry would be okay. However since my Bazel CI is cloud hosted , setting up a registry on a server that's securely accessible from CI and the local network is quite an ask given distribution is basically a non-issue for me since all Protos are in a vendored mono-repo.

This project solves some very real pain points in an area where there is not much in the market so I am looking from a practical point of view. Practical means, how specifically do I wire this project intoy existing Bazel mono repo to tackle proto composition and versioning?

I wouldn't call Bazel exactly a solution to the various proto problems because it's fundamentally a scalable polyglot build system. When you build basically everything, you cannot be exceleny at something; that's just the nature of polyglot.

Buf BSR seems fairly complete as far as I can tell, but then the question is how exactly this project differentiates itself and even more important how well does it integrate with Bazel?