non-hermetic Bazel action to enable remote caching

Question

I've been iterating on a bazel rule for a tool that is dependent on a "custom" (verilator if you're familiar). This tool is supposed to read arguments and inputs and generate cpp files. The action that invokes verilator is defined below

 ctx.actions.run(
    arguments = [args],
    executable = verilator_toolchain.verilator_bin,
    inputs = inputs,
    outputs = [verilator_output],
    progress_message = "[Verilator] Compiling {}".format(ctx.label),
)

The problem is that the executable given to this action is not /exactly/ the same across platforms -- it is slightly larger, has a different hash when comparing mac and linux executables here.

I can trust that the output can be the same, and I'd like to share a remote cache for this action for both platforms; is there a "best practice" where I can rewrite this action to be non-hermetic so the toolchain binary isn't considered as an "input" to the cache? I think the cpp rules do something similar to this.

Answer 1

No, outside of writing an incorrect, non-hermetic rule, there's no way to prevent Bazel for putting all action inputs into the hash key.