Today's "Huon does a proof of concept he may not have time to complete": https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/19161 sets up running pre-release pants against public repos, similar to Rust's crater. This potentially makes it easier to get earlier warning about breaking changes and bugs. Thoughts?

I was thinking of doing something similar. This way is a lot simpler than what I was thinking of. I like it. I think we might have difficulties around upgrades (as simple as regenerating lockfiles if we update a tool version, or more if we have to migrate), but that's also a useful signal for how much migration effort will be needed.