Idea time... When I was trying to simplify automation around release, one thing I wanted to do but failed was get rid of

src/python/pants/VERSION

and favor using

vcs_version

instead This has a few benefits: • Local builds look like such • Releases are even more automatable (no longer need a PR, if contributors list is the same, and we could easily argue that the contributors list is fluff, or doesnt need ot be syncd so often) • We can release a .0 or .1 using the exact same ref as the latest .rc 🎉 But it failed: Too many things in the Pants repo read the

VERSION

file before/during bootstrapping My idea was to switch the Pants repo to be a Pants repo (still in favor), but that's too difficult for me at the moment. But, what if we kept

VERSION

but trimmed it just to the Major/Minor? E.g.

2.20

. The bootstrapping reads would still work. For actual releases we'd use

vcs_version

to overwrite the contents.