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Stop adding repos to sys.path (set experimental_python_import_all_repositories to false)

Open rickeylev opened this issue 5 months ago • 0 comments

Right now, repo roots are added to sys.path. This is problematic for a variety of reasons

  • It causes the repos with external pip deps to end up on sys.path, which are just spam and just cause problems.
  • For the main repo and other external repos, they should be using the imports attribute on their public targets instead.

The situation is a bit complicated because the flag (and its default) are defined in bazel, while the implementation is in rules_python. Also, there's a decent reliance on this behavior in the broader ecosystem because it's been around for a long time, even though it was never a good idea to rely on it. With the advent of bzlmod, the reliance would only get worse (adding repo roots to path is helpful under bzlmod).

I think the venv site-packages work we've done will help this problem -- it allows mapping an arbitrary directory into site-packages, which should make materializing external repos under arbitrary names more flexible.

I think the steps needed are:

  1. [ ] Add a flag in rules_python to replace the bazel-builtin one.
  2. [ ] Let bazel remove their flag when appropriate. Note that doing this will force users to upgrade to a version of rules_python with (1)
  3. [ ] Disable adding repo roots for pip-generated repos. Do this by adding a marker file in the repo root (under the hood, these repos are added by doing listdir() on the runfiles root)
  4. [ ] Add an allowlist for which external repos are added to sys.path. We don't control non-pip repos, so need another mechanism to specify this. A flag that points to a target with repo names to allow being added onto sys.path is good compromise.
  5. [ ] Disable the behavior by default; users can use the allowlist to aid migration.
  6. [ ] Eventually remove the allowlist.

The old builtin flag (--foo) can be mapped to the new repo-flag (--@bla//:foo) using --flag_alias

This is the rules_python side of https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/2636

rickeylev avatar May 29 '25 16:05 rickeylev