Description of the problem / feature request:

Now that name-spaced resources are supported, teams that exclusively use this feature have no need for resource merging work, which ends up being a substantial fraction of a clean (or low incrementality) build.

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 0.28.1

Have you found anything relevant by searching the web?

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

For context, we turned this off in gradle and achieved about a 30% reduction in build times. Bazel's sensitivity to caching/incrementality will reduce this gain in high-incrementality situations, but might increase it in low-incrementality scenarios. Our observations from profiles are that we spend about a substantial fraction of our build, front-loaded, pegging our workers with this work.

Note: Copied from bazelbuild/bazel#8577 which I'm closing.