tensorflow: gcc: error: unrecognized command line option '-fcolor-diagnostics'

The issue is similar to #1192

I am trying build Tensorflow from source on UBUNTU machine (16.04 LTS) I am using following version of gcc and bazel

• gcc (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.5) 5.4.0 20160609
• bazel Build label: 0.9.0

Problem Description

I get a number of build errors during the bazel build phase. All errors are similar to one below (I used --verbose_failures option for bazel build):

ERROR: /home/murthy/tensorflow/tensorflow/core/BUILD:1656:1: Couldn't build file tensorflow/core/_objs/version_lib/tensorflow/core/util/version_info.pic.o: C++ compilation of rule '//tensorflow/core:version_lib' failed (Exit 1): gcc failed: error executing command (cd /home/murthy/.cache/bazel/_bazel_murthy/72b24eaacfd1d73bef6a8acb540b8c44/execroot/org_tensorflow && \ exec env - \ PWD=/proc/self/cwd \ PYTHON_BIN_PATH=/home/murthy/.virtualenvs/dl4cv/bin/python \ PYTHON_LIB_PATH=/home/murthy/.virtualenvs/dl4cv/lib/python3.5 \ TF_NEED_CUDA=0 \ TF_NEED_OPENCL_SYCL=0 \ /usr/bin/gcc -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -fstack-protector -Wall -B/usr/bin -B/usr/bin -Wunused-but-set-parameter -Wno-free-nonheap-object -fcolor-diagnostics -fno-omit-frame-pointer -g0 -O2 '-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=1' -DNDEBUG -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -DGEMMLOWP_ALLOW_SLOW_SCALAR_FALLBACK '-march=native' -mssse3 -mfma -mcx16 -msse4.1 -msse4.2 -mpopcnt -mavx '-std=c++0x' -MD -MF bazel-out/k8-py3-opt/bin/tensorflow/core/_objs/version_lib/tensorflow/core/util/version_info.pic.d '-frandom-seed=bazel-out/k8-py3-opt/bin/tensorflow/core/_objs/version_lib/tensorflow/core/util/version_info.pic.o' -fPIC -iquote . -iquote bazel-out/k8-py3-opt/genfiles -iquote external/bazel_tools -iquote bazel-out/k8-py3-opt/genfiles/external/bazel_tools -isystem external/bazel_tools/tools/cpp/gcc3 -DEIGEN_AVOID_STL_ARRAY -Iexternal/gemmlowp -Wno-sign-compare -fno-exceptions '-ftemplate-depth=900' -msse3 -pthread -fno-canonical-system-headers -Wno-builtin-macro-redefined '-D__DATE__="redacted"' '-D__TIMESTAMP__="redacted"' '-D__TIME__="redacted"' -c bazel-out/k8-py3-opt/genfiles/tensorflow/core/util/version_info.cc -o bazel-out/k8-py3-opt/bin/tensorflow/core/_objs/version_lib/tensorflow/core/util/version_info.pic.o) gcc: error: unrecognized command line option '-fcolor-diagnostics' Target //tensorflow/tools/pip_package:build_pip_package failed to build

What did I do?

I manually removed the -fcolor-diagnostics flag and gcc did not give an error. further I looked up the man pages for gcc and was surprised to find

Language Independent Options -fmessage-length=n -fdiagnostics-show-location=[once|every-line] -fdiagnostics-color=[auto|never|always] -fno-diagnostics-show-option -fno-diagnostics-show-caret

Note: the interchange in the words ‘diagnostics’ and ‘color’ in the man pages as compared to that in flags for bazel build

I am not sure if this is Tensorflow issue or bazel issue but am looking for a way to suppress the -fcolor-diagnostics' flag or change it to -fdiagnostics-color`