I agree that makes sense and might be the change we need to make. In our current setup we have a lot of files that live outside of the classpath that we depend on - shell scripts or groovy scripts that call methods inside Java code for example, or data files that are read from outside of the classpath. It would be nice to somehow attach these to the java_library targets so you could have the code, the resources (in the classpath) and the bundles (outside of the classpath) that are associated with the code.