Unable to handle namespace packages like azure and google

[BenMatase]

When using these rules with a family of pip packages (e.g. azure and google packages) which install as part of the same "namespace", python is unable to import them at runtime.

For example, if I try to use azure-mgmt-compute which provides the azure.mgmt.compute module and azure-mgmt-resource which provides the azure.mgmt.resource module, I run into this issue since they both install into the azure top level module. My pylint rules complain

ben.py:10:0: E0611: No name 'mgmt' in module 'azure' (no-name-in-module)
ben.py:10:0: E0401: Unable to import 'azure.mgmt' (import-error)

as well as when I go to actually run the packaged up par:

  File "path/to/file/ben.py", line 14, in <module>
    from azure.mgmt import compute, network, resource
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'azure.mgmt'

The build of the target succeeds, so only at run time does it fail.

I've found that this seems to be a known issue with bazel's rules_python which I found through this issue which I found through this issue (where this rule set is said to possibly fix this issue).

The repo for rules_python_external seems to have solved this issue and after doing some digging, it looks like they handle this by detecting and treating those "namespace" packages on wheel extraction.

[BenMatase]

I can do the work and try and fix this in this repo, but could use some pointers