Reduce Pants' 3rdparty dependencies

[thejcannon]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
In an ideal world, Pants-the-wheel has no 3rdparty reliance. Everything is either provided through static Rust code in the engine, or we use Pex to download and install tools (like we do today).

This would reduce Pants' installation footprint, increase security, and would be a slight bump in first-time installation of Pants.

Describe the solution you'd like
The pantsbuild wheel requires 0 3rdparty deps.

Describe alternatives you've considered
N/A

Additional context
🌮

[benjyw]

I'm not sure I agree that this is a desirable goal. Like any other codebase, we commonly use Python libraries. These are not tools we invoke via a subprocess, so I don't see the analogy to those.

If the purpose is to avoid a pip resolve at install time, this is what scie is for. In a pants-scie world, we would deploy a binary that contains all the 3rdparty deps already baked into the file.

[benjyw]

I think the energy should be going in to pants-as-a-scie. That gives us, I think, the wins this issue is striving for, as well as cutting pypi out of our deploy entirely, in favor of github releases. One download and done!

[thejcannon]

I don't think the scie solution solves the size or security concerns, and surely doesn't help with the issue of conflicting dependencies (like we recently got hurt by the requests library colliding with in-repo plugins).

Consider the reason we don't add new dependencies today (at the top of requirements.txt). Would we have added our current deps if they weren't already there?

Also imagine if we didn't need to build Pants as a PEX for scie to work. The wheel was all you needed...

[benjyw]

Sure, it is better not to need external deps in a vacuum. But we use them! The alternatives I see are to replicate functionality in our codebase that we could be using from someone else's, which doesn't seem like a great tradeoff except in trivial cases. Or to remove functionality. Or am I missing a third option here? I suppose more binding to Rust functionality (e.g., to replace requests)? That could make sense, and improve performance.

The third-party plugin issue is indeed thorny. Reducing our own deps will mitigate that, and is a good reason to pursue this (why not mentioned above though...) We can't fully solve this though - if you consume two third-party plugins (say not provided by us) their requirements can collide! But I agree that we are the overwhelmingly dominant provider of plugins for now, so our own footprint is the main problem.

And is size actually an issue? Some numbers would be instructive.

[thejcannon]

Yes, another option is use rust facilities, which has its own tradeoffs, but more stomachable.

And the last is Pex. Some of our dependencies could be provided by shifting to a PEX process.

[benjyw]

And the last is Pex. Some of our dependencies could be provided by shifting to a PEX process.

For example? These would have to be cases where process invocation overhead is tolerable. I guess network requests might fall under that category.

[kaos]

I don't think 0 dependencies is a reachable goal, but agree with keeping the number of deps low (as low as sensible) and periodically actively reviewing which deps we have is probably a good idea.

[thejcannon]

OK, here's my homework:

Scraped from:
pants paths --from=src/python/pants:pants-packaged --to=3rdparty/python/requirements.txt | | grep \# | sort | uniq

Name	Purpose	Backends	Removal Strategy	Difficulty/Risk
ansicolors	Terminal Colorer	(core)	just in-source	Low/Low
chevron	templating	Go	string.Template or f-strings	Low/Low
fasteners	locks	(core)	in-source maybe?	???/Medium
ijson	json parser	Go	json stdlib, otherwise Rust-based	(Depends?)/Low
importlib-resources	resource-loading	(core)	stdlibrary (yay Py3.9!)	Low/Low
node-semver	version comparison	JS	???	???
packaging	version comparison	(core), Python	???	???/High
pex	(We literally use it just to get PEX_PYTHON_PATH from RC files)	Python	In-Source or use a process	Low/Low
psutil	Process utilities	(core)	Move to Rust	???/High
python-lsp-jsonrpc	LSP Support	(BSP)	???	???/???
PyYAML	YAML loading/dumping	Helm, JS, OpenAI, (core)	Move to Rust	Medium/Low
setproctitle	Set/Get Process title	(core)	In-Source or Move to Rust	Low/Low
setuptools	Resource loading, Requirement Parsing	Java, JS, Python, (core), JVM	Use importlib for resources. Reqs use ???	???/High
toml	TOML support	Python, BSP, JVM, (core)	Move to Rust	Medium/Low
types-PyYAML	typing	N/A	Just exclude...	Low/Low
types-setuptools	typing	N/A	Just exclude...	Low/Low
types-toml	typing	N/A	Just exclude...	Low/Low
typing-extensions	Future typing shenanigans	Docker, Helm, JS, (core), Python	Case-by-case, newer Python helps a bunch	Medium/Low

There's some that I couldn't guess the strategy or difficulty off-the-bat.

So some things I see:

• Certain imports are just for a single backend. I consider it rude to force these dependencies in the Pants environment for a backend people may-or-may-not use. Of course the real solution here is to separate backends from the core Pants wheel, but we're nowhere near that today. The good news is most of these are low-hanging fruit we ought to pick anyways.
• A few are for reading/writing of data/config files. Those can be easily ported to Rust with a thing Python wrapper
• scie-pants was a leap, since we can use more modern Pythons. Resource loading, typing, and maybe TOML support all get stdlib support (depending on if we upgrade again)
• packaging will be a bitch to upgrade, but it's mostly (all?) version parsing. We might consider vendoring that code?
• BSP support maybe should be a plugin on its own? Unclear.

---

So, that puts us in a place where I think if we figure out the more hairy ones, we really could have 0 3rdparty reqs.

I'd also argue it's probably worth picking the low-hanging fruit so the list is as small as possible 😄 I'm happy to do that myself. Hell, I'm happy to do all of this work.

[thejcannon]

(FWIW importlib_resources can and should be removed: #19339)

[github-actions]

This issue has been open for over one year without activity and is not labeled as a bug. It has been labeled as stale to invite any further updates. If you can confirm whether the issue is still applicable to the latest version of Pants, appears in other contexts, or its priority has changed, please let us know. Please feel free to close this issue if it is no longer relevant.