Q: Should the outdir

dist

allowed to be overridden on a per-goal basis? To me, something like

pants export --out [wherever-my-default-is]

would make sense, rather than needing to re-configure my IDE settings or workspace settings because I'm using pants.

Would be interested in something like this, I currently symlink to

.venv

because that’s where most developers expect to find it

rm -rf dist/export/python
pants export --resolve=python-default
ln -s dist/export/python/virtualenvs/python-default/3* .venv

it's a global option, so that may be a non-starter for some use cases (i.e. pantsd may restart everytime you change a global option value) but apart from that, how close do you get with:

pants --pants-distdir=.venv export ...

i.e. you can set it per invocation already..

the layout isn’t what most people would expect (it nests a bunch of folders), so you still have to symlink

Wrote mutable virtualenv for python-default (using Python 3.11.8) to .venv/export/python/virtualenvs/python-default/3.11.8

I’d expect a

.venv/bin/activate

it's a global option, so that may be a non-starter for some use cases (i.e. pantsd may restart everytime you change a global option value

Yeah, exactly, that's kinda weird. But, it's also infrequent enough to not matter for most of my purposes. But... Weird. However, with big enough repos, this restart is like a minute on my machine. I've setup a

pants venv

alias to see how it actually feels to use in practice - and then I'm looking at auto-updating the .vscode settings so that they work together (in an alias/pipe situation) So could end up as

pants export --vscode

or something more crazy