tensorflow: Android demo: unable to build with Bazel, could not read RELEASE.TXT

Environment info

Operating System: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit

Installed version of CUDA and cuDNN: none (not using GPU)

Steps to reproduce

Note: TensorFlow was installed previously.

1. Install Bazel as instructed here: http://www.bazel.io/docs/install.html#install-on-ubuntu
2. Install Android Studio (which includes the SDK).
3. Install Android NDK through the Android Studio SDK Manager.
4. Download and unzip the TensorFlow graph as instructed here: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/examples/android/README.md
5. Uncomment the Android entries in the WORKSPACE file and add in paths to the SDK and NDK (in my case, these were /home/me/Android/Sdk and /home/me/android-studio/android-studio/plugins/android-ndk)
6. Run $ bazel build //tensorflow/examples/android:tensorflow_demo

What have you tried?

1. I’ve looked around, and my understanding is that the RELEASE.TXT file is not included in the most recent version of the Android NDK. Since the NDK installed via Android Studio is a .jar file, I wasn’t sure what to do with that, so I went to the path indicated by the terminal log and created a blank RELEASE.TXT file. This made no difference.
2. According to #1468, it can be resolved by downgrading to an earlier version of the NDK which contains RELEASE.TXT. I downloaded the version of Bazel (for Linux) from the links given, but the downloaded file is a .bin, which is unusable to me. As such, I found this solution to be a dead end.
3. Commenting out the NDK entry is said to resolve the issue, but I haven’t tried this yet, since I don’t know if it’ll cause more complications down the road.

Logs or other output that would be helpful

ERROR: no such package '@androidndk//': Could not read RELEASE.TXT in Android NDK: /home/me/.cache/bazel/_bazel_me/f3471be34d1e62bf21975aa777cedaa3/external/androidndk/ndk/RELEASE.TXT (No such file or directory).
ERROR: no such package '@androidndk//': Could not read RELEASE.TXT in Android NDK: /home/me/.cache/bazel/_bazel_me/f3471be34d1e62bf21975aa777cedaa3/external/androidndk/ndk/RELEASE.TXT (No such file or directory).

Is there another way to resolve this issue without downgrading or commenting out the NDK entry? If not, how can I install a previous version of Android NDK? Thanks in advance.