Description
The automatic generation of __init__.py files has been a source of odd, surprising, and incorrect behavior. e.g. it makes directories importable that shouldn't be importable. This is because it's logic is extremely simple: create an init.py file in every parent directory for a path that ends with .py or .so.
It's also expensive: it requires flattening the runfiles at analysis time.
Some of the venv site package work incidentally side-steps this because the way it creates symlinks "hides" some of the paths from the regular set of runfiles.
Addressing this is a bit more complicated because the incompatible_default_to_explicit_init_py lives in bazel, but the usage is in rules_python.
In any case, I think the todo list is:
- Add a rules_python flag to replace incompatible_default_to_explicit_init_py
- Disable the behavior by default
- Remove the dead code paths
Users can use --flag_alias to map (1) to the bazel builtin flag.
This is the rules_python side of bazelbuild/bazel#7386