Description of the problem / feature request:

Now that name-spaced resources are supported, teams that exclusively use this feature have no need for the expensive resource merging work.

Feature requests: what underlying problem are you trying to solve with this feature?

Reduce unnecessary work during an android build.

Bugs: what's the simplest, easiest way to reproduce this bug? Please provide a minimal example if possible.

Write any trivial app which consumes .aars, and depend on a namespaced resource directly (rather than in the local R.class). Then build. All the resources are merged into the current library, even though the current library doesn't require local references to these.

What operating system are you running Bazel on?

Mac OS X 10.14.5

What's the output of bazel info release?

release 0.25.2

Have you found anything relevant by searching the web?

Discussion with @jin has confirmed that the resource merging is (presently) mandatory.