there is a vendored in version of skylib under third_party

[aiuto]

That's just an anti-pattern. We should use the real one, or recreate the few needed features and not call it skylib.

[alexeagle]

We did this because bzlmod isn't a thing yet, and didn't want to make a breaking change where we require users to install some rules_python dependencies because rules_python is so foundational and users easily get a skewed version of bazel_skylib if we depended on one. I don't really agree it's an antipattern. I think core rulesets should just ship with zero dependencies until most users are on bzlmod.

[johnynek]

The old "the old thing is deprecated and the new thing is not ready yet".

[alexeagle]

Obviously the other problem is that skylib wasn't accepting contributions for many months, so like other users we had to fork.