[rtpg]

It's not about the package managers not being polyglot. It's about, for example, witnessing that `pip install` installs binaries with absolute paths and then writing a patch _for pip_ that Bazel uses, instead of figuring out how to change upstream pip to make that a configuration bit that Bazel uses.

Bazel uses npm/cargo/pip in most people's usage of these tools! People still use these packages managers, with random patches and tweaks (because the overall ecosystem assumes you're using them). But Bazel often includes random fixups in their own tools.

For example [0] is some patches Bazel does to node to get it to play nicely witH Bazel. In an (IMO) better world Bazel people figure out what they need, and figure out what they can get upstreamed into node to get things working.

Instead we have patches that (if you jump through the history) have been around for 6+ years

[0]: https://github.com/aspect-build/rules_js/tree/main/js/privat...

[dzbarsky]

This comment gives off the impression that bazel just wraps cargo/pip/npm invocations, which is incorrect (at least in the commonly used scenarios)

First of all, bazel does not handle any of these languages/ecosystems itself. Such logic is delegated to language-specific rulesets, of which there are multiple implementations with different tradeoffs.

For python - https://github.com/aspect-build/rules_py parses a UV lockfile and does not use either UV or pip at build time.

For rust - https://github.com/hermeticbuild/rules_rs parses the cargo lockfiles but does not invoke cargo for compilation.

For js, https://github.com/aspect-build/rules_js parses the pnpm lockfile but does not invoke npm or pnpm at build time in the commonly used configurations.

While it's true that bazel allows to patch all dependencies on the fly, in my experience many Bazel users do try to contribute back, because managing stacks of hundreds of patches across all your dependencies isn't particularly fun.

[rtpg]

sorry, you're right and I didn't express my idea well

> For python - https://github.com/aspect-build/rules_py parses a UV lockfile and does not use either UV or pip at build time.

rules_python does for example call into piptools to do installation

https://github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_python/blob/main/pyth...

To be honest this stuff feels like it's gotten soooo much better in the years since I've used Bazel. (one can easily argue that it's been thanks to language ecosystems getting their things better) compared to when I've last had to use Bazel back in 2021-2022 (I had initially set up Bazel in ... 2018 for an existing Python project). So this might be a bit like relitigating Python 3.0. The lessons are learned perhaps!

If I want to be very cynical... I think there is a universe where uv could have existed 5 years earlier if Google had decided "we're going to extract our Bazel learnings to get Python packaging to be better".

You might say "well they have blaze they don't need this" and that's kind of the point. In the world of setup.py you still need some language-specific infrastructure. Google and friends could have pushed things along in interesting ways, IMO!

But given their general sort of "we just vendor everything in" attitude they don't need to do that. So language ecosystems don't get the right kind of pushes and it takes us a decade for someone in the Python community to write "lockfiles that work + a package installer that works". Feels like a missed opportunity, mainly.

[forrestthewoods]

> Bazel uses npm/cargo/pip in most people's usage of these tools!

Oh interesting. Buck totally replaces cargo / pip. I think the JS story is a little messier. Not sure as I try my best to not touch JS.

[dzbarsky]

See my comment above - the common language rulesets work in similar ways as Buck(2), AIUI. (Except bazel has features to consume external dependencies without vendoring, as opposed to Reindeer approach for example). Another difference is that since Bazel has much more adoption across the OSS world, there are more viable choices in language implementation rulesets, as opposed to Buck's prelude.