I have a feeling this question has been asked 1000s of time but I'm having a hard time searching for the answers I need. When I run

pants tailor ::

to boostrap my repo, I end up with a plethora of

BUILD

files in every subfolder of all the apps we have (our devs love folders for module separation). Is this really best practice? How do I convince my devs that all these files are necessary and the best practice? especially when they will never be customized or touched after they're created. Can I create one or two per service that would contain all my information necessary for building pex, environments, docker images, etc?

You can create your own, but then you are creating your own. You have to weigh devs being annoyed? by the presence of files they don't have to maintain vs having less files but having to maintain them. "Best practice" here is a bad phrase that just hides a real tradeoff. The best practice is picking your tradeoff.

Sometimes I managed to use recursive globs to avoid this, but I think this has caching implications? E.g. for my tests there is just one BUILD file that does somethinglike

***/*_test*.py

in the sources list.

That shouldn't affect caching - those globs expand internally to file-level targets

ah interesting background. you think tailor will be later modified to reduce the amount of extraneous BUILD files? I do like the idea of having a ci tool to ensure proper config vs me managing it all by hand. I just know how much whining I'll hear about these extra files

Yeah, that whining seems justified to me. Especially when those files have basically no information, they are just placeholders for where you might one day want to introduce extra metadata.

I conveniently did not mention all of the BUILD files when demoing pants in the StackStorm project. I focused on all of the benefits including lockfiles and improved UX for developers over the tangled mess of a Makefile no one wanted to touch. Only after I got the green light did I explain that these minimal BUILD files would be generated and included throughout the repo - and I added a CI check to ensure people didn’t forget to run tailor.

I’m a happy recursive globber - 1 BUILD file per project, never had an issue with it. Value to me is reduction in visual clutter (which I think something like VSCode can hide) - but it’s mostly just seeing 50 BUILD file options when I try to shortcut open a BUILD file that irks me. Recently a huge annoyance after sveltekits latest update too - with all routes having the same filename 🤦‍♂️

"happy recursive globber" should be on your linkedin profile

I think my LinkedIn profile states that I am an “avid lover of long walks on the beach, unnecessarily complex conversation, and Oxford commas”

That would be gold if you left off the embedded Oxford comma of course.

That’s more of a twitter profile

thanks yall I'm going to poke at this more