What does the bazelbuild/rules_proto repo do exactly?

[Mohamed Heikal]

Bazel documentation for protos points to the bazelbuild/rules_proto github repo saying to use that one instead because the native rules are deprecated. However the rules_proto repo is basically empty. All it contains are wrappers around the native rules and symbols (the ones that were marked as deprecated in the first place). What exactly is the purpose of this repo, why should I use it instead of using native bazel rules directly when all it does is just wrap the native rules and add a tag?

[Yannic Bonenberger]

There are plans to rewrite the native proto rules in Starlark and move them out of Bazel core into the rules_proto repo. As a first step, rules_proto provides wrappers around the native rules so users can update their BUILD files. See https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/8891 and https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/8922