I do find it a bit hard to get started with pants when using it as a

make

replacement. Maybe that's me or a lack of documentation, but is there a way to "ease in" and not start using the pre-made plugins/languages? There's so much stuff that's not supported in those, that still requires some build step (like asset pipelines for web, or generating documentation, or compiling a latex document, or ...).

Interesting. Pants wasn't really designed as a generic make replacement. There are some generic steps capabilities (via

ad_hoc_tool

), but those were intended to supplement use of the language-aware backends.

Yes, I've seen the shell script and adhoc steps. Maybe I should just use make 🙂 Or earthly. However I do like pantsbuild and thought it could be used in that domain. Maybe that's something that could be extended via plugins down the line. I think a monorepo will always have some custom things.

Could you write up your use cases in more detail in a github issue? It would be great to have a specific example in mind if/when we tackle this

Ah, probably my case would anyway be tackled when there's javascript support, as I wanted to use postcss to process css files.

My personal day-to-day experience is not typical, so I will throw this question out to the wider readership 🙂