[bazel][FR] Consider a workspace() function to recursively add dependencies

[coryan]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Starting with #1408 (which was included in v1.7.1) all users for google/benchmark via Bazel must provide the @libpfm repository or must set the perfcounters config to 0
As you may know, Bazel does not load WORKSPACE files recursively (see bazelbuild/bazel#1943 for history, and bzlmod for the modern thing). This meas downstream projects must add this dependency to their own WORKSPACE files.

Describe the solution you'd like

By convention, Bazel projects provide a *_deps() or workspace() function to load the dependencies they need. For example, this is one in Tensorflow:

https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/workspace2.bzl
https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/workspace1.bzl

and here is what grpc does:

https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/grpc_deps.bzl

Anything along those lines would be helpful.

Describe alternatives you've considered

You could wait until bzlmod is ready, but I do not know if that works with rules_foreign_cc

Additional context

Adding a new dep seems surprising for a patch release.

[Forchapeatl]

Hello everyone. @coryan it seems like . Please help me.

benchmark/WORKSPACE

Line 1 in 2257fa4

workspace(name = "com_github_google_benchmark")