Didn't have time to finish this. Tried doing:

• Bumping minimum tested version of bazel to 7.4.1
• Remove the 7.x config from bazelrc
• Add --enable_workspace to workspace only examples (actually, should we move them to internal or somewhere, so that they don't advertise WORKSPACE support anymore?).

The build is failing with rules_java and it seems that it might be defined somewhere early in the process for the WORKSPACE builds.

Reverted the changes and trying a more minimal stop-gap solution.

The build is failing with rules_java ...
ERROR: Error computing the main repository mapping: cannot load '@@rules_java//java:rules_java_deps.bzl': no such file

Ugh, that error. I've seen that a ton while trying to get Bazel 9 workspace working. From what I've been able to tell, it means rules_java needs to be upgraded.

Ah, I see we have CI coverage for bazel 8 bzlmod, but not workspace 🤦 .

This is what I have in some WIP stuff for bazel 9:

    http_archive(
        name = "rules_java",
        urls = [
            "https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_java/releases/download/8.6.2/rules_java-8.6.2.tar.gz",
        ],
        sha256 = "a64ab04616e76a448c2c2d8165d836f0d2fb0906200d0b7c7376f46dd62e59cc",
    )

There may also be a change to the rules_java_dependencies() call in internal_dev_setup.bzl needed -- load("@rules_java//java:deps.bzl", "rules_java_dependencies") might be needed. (not entirely sure)