[Bug]: Conflicting symlinks found when attempting to create venv.

[anuragkanungo]

What happened?

Using version 0.7.3 I am seeing

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Error:   × Unable to run command:
  ├─▶ Conflicting symlinks found when attempting to create venv. More than one
  │   package provides the file at these paths
  ├─▶ pip_deps_mcap_protobuf_support/site-packages/tests/test_writer.py
  ╰─▶ site-packages/tests/test_writer.py

These are the files

./bazel-voxel/external/pip_deps_mcap/site-packages/tests/test_writer.py
./bazel-voxel/external/pip_deps_mcap_protobuf_support/site-packages/tests/test_writer.py

In a typical pip installation the second file overwrites the first one.

Version

Development (host) and target OS/architectures: Linux x86-64

Output of bazel --version: bazel 7.1.0

Version of the Aspect rules, or other relevant rules from your WORKSPACE or MODULE.bazel file: 0.7.3

Language(s) and/or frameworks involved:

How to reproduce

Adding these pip packages

mcap==0.0.15
mcap-protobuf-support==0.0.9

### Any other information?

_No response_

[mattem]

In a typical pip installation the second file overwrites the first one.

Are the file contents checked before overwriting, or only the name taken into consideration? If so, then which one wins? My concern is that the ordering of the dependencies matter here, and rules_py will need to ensure the same dependency ordering as pip, which may not be possible.

In this case, both those libraries should not be shipping test cases into the distribution package.

[alexeagle]

Discussed with Matt that this injected __init__.py that rules_python puts in namespaced-packages https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python/blob/03854a20c39e9e9bfebe91802102715cb027220a/python/private/pypi/whl_installer/namespace_pkgs.py#L95-L96 is a particularly gross violation triggering this error.

Will probably just allow these conflicting symlinks and print a warning, then add a flag letting you suppress that warning.

[hofbi]

I get a similar error

Error:   × Unable to run command:
  ├─▶ Conflicting symlinks found when attempting to create venv. More than one
  │   package provides the file at these paths
  ├─▶ rules_python~~pip~rules_ros_pip_deps_38_pyyaml/site-packages/yaml/
  │   loader.py
  ╰─▶ site-packages/yaml/loader.py

Allowing these conflicts and printing a warning seems like a reasonable approach.

[antspy]

Is the intended solution here to use package_collisions='ignore' any time this happens? Or should we wait for a long term fix?

(I am hitting this when installing pandera[polars] and polars).