2026 Priorities

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:
- #2156
- Consolidating `*_bazel.bzl` files, removing `semantics.bzl`, and general cleanup of the core rule implementations:
- #2522
- Implementing uv-based toolchain
- #1975
- Supporting other lockfile formats (e.g. [PEP751](https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/))
- #2787
- Build-phase sdist building
- #2410
- Solution to implicit dependencies on user-space libraries. Related:
- #2094
- #2370
- Implementing a C++ based bootstrap (expanding bootstrap to support e.g. compiled languages)
- #2500
- Make `bootstrap_impl=script` the default
- #2521
- Splitting sphinxdocs into its own bzlmod MODULE
- #2511
- Toolchains for local interpreters
- #2070
- Stabilize the pulling of platform-specific wheels matching target platform (i.e. `experimental_index_url`):
- #260
- #2241
- #1357
- #2559
- Zip stdlib to reduce file count / runfiles overhead
- #1653

cc @aignas @groodt

Start by choosing one of the linked topics and reading its associated issue, such as #2156, #2522, #1975, or #2787; this umbrella issue names no file, test, or entry point. Done cannot be defined here because it requests neither a specific change nor acceptance criteria.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.