2026 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:
  • Implement venv/site-packages based binaries #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)
  • Support PEP751 lockfile format in bzlmod #2787
• 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)
  • Support native binary-based stage1 bootstrap #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):
  • "Cross compilation" of py_binary/py_image/py_library targets #260
  • 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
• Zip stdlib to reduce file count / runfiles overhead
  • Hermetic toolchains incur a significant overhead to running py_binary and py_test #1653

cc @aignas @groodt