The Getting Started guide has you copy base_workspace/ to create a workspace in which to place projects. The workspace contains symlinks into the bazel checkout for examples/, third_party/, tools/.

This works well for a local project, but does not work if I wish to publish a project using Bazel, as the symlinks will almost certainly point to the wrong location. How are projects expected to handle this? I could not find it mentioned in any of the docs. The only obvious solution I see is to do a real copy of the tools/ directory into my project. However, that means that future Bazel changes will effectively need to be merged into my repository.

I mention tools/ specifically, because examples/ and third_party/ don't seem to be required, at least for a basic project, however tools/ is (Without tools/, I get ERROR: Loading of target '//tools/cpp:toolchain' failed; build aborted: no such package 'tools/cpp': BUILD file not found on package path.).