buildifier examines .git

[jeffalder]

Buildifier attempts to scan the entire working directory. If you have a git repo, it looks in .git as well. That means that if your remote has a branch called foobar.bzl, buildifier fix will see that it is an invalid value.

Note that you can use exclude_patterns BUT then:

Error in fail: Cannot use 'exclude_patterns' in a test rule without 'no_sandbox'

And then if you set no_sandbox:

Error in fail: Cannot use 'no_sandbox' without a 'workspace'

And this is where we are stuck. We have tried multiple formats for this parameter:
workspace = "WORKSPACE", workspace = "/home/jeff/mycheckout/WORKSPACE", workspace = "//WORKSPACE" and more. There is no clear documentation for this and we have been unable to move beyond this. If someone can clue me into the correct syntax I'll happily update and PR the docs. (Of course, I don't quite understand why exclude_patterns requires no_sandbox, or why the workspace can't default to the current workspace.)