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pantsbuild / pants

The Pants Build System
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Get rid of boilerplate/trivial BUILD files #14074

Open asherf opened 2 years ago

asherf commented 2 years ago

I find that there are a lot of BUILD files contain just boilerplate:

python_sources()

or

python_sources()
python_tests(name="tests")
python_test_utils(name="test_utils")

or 

shell_sources()

Pants should be able to infer those so we don't actually need to have those on the file system and in source control.

Eric-Arellano commented 2 years ago

Currently, one role of targets is to explicitly opt into what Pants should operate on. But this isn't a compelling motivation - we can switch into an opt-out model. That's how ./pants tailor works with its [tailor].ignore_* options, and I think it works well.

thejcannon commented 2 years ago

I think the way we'll eventually "accomplish" this is through the "recursive" target generators @Eric-Arellano has been getting is nearer to.

So you'd just have a root BUILD with python_sources(recurse=True) (or whatever). We haven't decided overrides, but that's the gist.

Eric-Arellano commented 2 years ago

Possibly -- for that to make sense, we might need support for a subdirectory BUILD file overriding a parent. Which imo is somewhat controversial and needs design. I'm not committed to "recursive target generators" or anything, but do indeed want to give us options.

Another approach discussed w/ several users in Slack is first-class support for BUILD file management, e.g. Buildozer. It would help w/ how annoying it is to update metadata for several places. It would not help, though, with the ugly aesthetics of mostly empty files.

stuhood commented 2 years ago

IMO, we should close this one in favor of #13767, and add any keywords needed over there.

Eric-Arellano commented 2 years ago

I think it might depend on which problem(s) we are prioritizing solving:

While related, https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/13767 seems more focused on the first problem of changing metadata for many files. In such that—a totally valid solution for https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/13767 is to lean into something like Buildozer—but that is not a valid solution for this issue.