2025 Priorities

[rickeylev]

This issue is to capture some of the topics that we, the rules_python maintainers, are particularly interested in this coming year. These are topics where we'd be particularly excited by PRs or design discussions.

Note that these are not promises of particular work. This is still a community driven project, so people work on what they find interesting or rewarding.

Topics are in no particular order. Discussion for a topic should be in their associated issue. This is not an exclusive list.

• A venv and site-packages layout for dependencies:
  • Lack of site-packages breaks assumptions of third-party packages causing friction #2156
• Consolidating *_bazel.bzl files, removing semantics.bzl, and general cleanup of the core rule implementations:
  • refactor: consolidate _bazel.bzl and remove semantics.bzl #2522
• Implementing uv-based toolchain
  • Support uv as part of rules_python #1975
• Supporting other lockfile formats (e.g. PEP751)
• Module-based main (python -m <name>)
  • Support python -m invocation style #2539
• Build-phase sdist building
  • Support building from sdist in a build action #2410
• Solution to implicit dependencies on user-space libraries. Related:
  • Support a default hub repo concept in bzlmod #2094
  • Generate one Bazel repo per dependency #2370
• Implementing a C++ based bootstrap (expanding bootstrap to support e.g. compiled languages)
  • Use statically linked loader #2500
• Make bootstrap_impl=script the default
  • Make script bootstrap the default #2521
• Splitting sphinxdocs into its own bzlmod MODULE
  • Split out //sphinxdocs to be a separate bazel submodule and setup publishing to BCR #2511
• Toolchains for local interpreters
  • Allow using a locally installed Python runtime as a full toolchain #2070
• Stabilize the pulling of platform-specific wheels matching target platform (i.e. experimental_index_url):
  • Silence download 404 errors when using bazel downloader (experimental_index_url and experimental_extra_index_urls) #2100
  • Avoid merge conflicts in MODULE.bazel.lock #2434
  • "Cross compilation" of py_binary/py_image/py_library targets #260
  • [pypi] Support python micro version in env marker based dependency evaluation #2319
  • Third party dependencies are incorrect when using RBE because host != exec #2241
  • Use bazel's downloader for downloading pip packages #1357
  • Introduce targets for all_requirements, all_whl_requirements, all_data_requirements #2559

cc @aignas @groodt

[aignas]

I have modified the list above to include more references and I realized that I want to stabilize the #260 work and make it default at some point.