I guess there's an excellent reason why that I just understand, but why would these be the defaults https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/blob/2505e54f2d8dde4f509caa7749de5ab8ae1de450/src/python/pants/core/util_rules/system_binaries.py#L46 instead of

$PATH

?

It has to do with catching I believe. As your $PATH changed you'd invalidate the cache entries that depend on this (which I probably a good portion of the internal graph)

Ah, makes sense. I guess that'd mostly apply for sharing distributed build caches, right?

$PATH

rarely changes (at least on my machine 😅 )

That's probably accurate.