In working on rules_docker, I found that regardless of any configuration of the build, actions were non-deterministic because the presence of a { character in certain attributes caused rules like container_image to always stamp outputs, and since the stable-status.txt file is an input to the action, it was non-deterministic and caused cache misses.

Since there's no real contract between Bazel and rulesets regarding the meaning of --stamp and how rules should present a non-deterministic stamping facility to users, there's a lot of inconsistency. (For starters, ctx.info_file and ctx.status_file are undocumented) I think we'd benefit from an --incompatible flag on Bazel itself.

As a strawman, call it --incompatible_prevent_status_files_without_stamp which, unless --stamp is also present, would either prevent the *-status.txt files from being passed as inputs to actions, or would error the build and point to the rule implementation that is including those files as inputs.

Related:

• Allow Starlark rules to observe the --stamp setting #11164
• ctx.info_file is not documented #9363
• Remove system specific information from stable-status.txt #10177