#20898 Consistent option hierarchy Issue created by grihabor The problems Right now

Subsystem

options,

Goal

options and

Target

fields are unrelated and therefore inconsistent. This means that every backend has to define it's own options for all the levels and make sure they all work together nicely. Problems with

--filter

Simple filtering on cli works:

pants lint --filter-target-type=python_source ::

Now imagine you want to do the same thing in

pants.toml

, how do you do that? I would expect this to work:

[lint]
filter-target-type = ["python_source"]

But it doesn't, because

lint

goal doesn't have

filter-target-type

option, for some reason

filter

is a subsystem of it's own:

[filter]
target_type = ["python_source"]

This means you can't control individual goals filter options. Problems with

skip

Filtering linters to run happens on all 3 layers of options. To choose one single linter in CLI you can use

only

option in

lint

goal subsystem:

pants lint --only=shfmt ::

To skip one single linter it has to implement

skip

option in it's own subsystem:

pants lint --shfmt-skip ::

To skip one single target the target itself has to implement

skip

field:

shell_sources(skip_shfmt=True)

Inconsistencies between options and fields In general, there are many options that are present in subsystem, but missing in the target, and vise versa. For example, there is a verbosity option in

pex

subsystem, but the option is missing in

pex_binary

. On the other hand

pex_binary

has `layout` field that is missing in

pex

subsystem. Environments This inconsistency probably involves interaction with environments too. The solution Not sure how to fix it, but it will probably require redesigning a bunch of pieces including core into a sound option hierarchy. TODO pantsbuild/pants