I often get error messages about un-inferrable imports etc. but they disappear when running the same command again, even with -lwarning etc. set. Is there a way to force pants to always display these warnings?

Typically that's because the process that generated those warnings was cached, so it doesn't run the second time. We don't cache processes that error, but we do if they only warn and return exit code 0.

Oh, well that makes sense and provides a way for me to reproduce it so I can get the errors fixed. Thanks!

Slight correction. It isn't the process cache but the memoization in the daemon. Just running the command with --no-pantsd should show you the warning

Do we replay stdout/stderr for all cached processes?

It depends on the rule output type. But they wouldn't matter here. These are warnings coming from the dep inference rules

Ah, good point

that's a really important thing to know IMHO ... so thx and maybe consider to highlight it in the onboarding documentation? well, maybe I don't get it right - as it seems, that's more like an error then a warning, isn't it?