Are generated targets supposed to depend on the generator? Or can the generator depend on its generated targets? I think I remember discussion about dependencies like this causing issues, but I can't remember what issues those were.

Generators have a dependency on their generated targets.

Thank you for the link, that was helpful. I haven't found the code that adds the dependency from

GeneratorTarget

to its generated targets. I think I saw something about the files based generator, but that isn't quite what I needed. It turns out I can't really turn

PythonDistribution

until a generator because that would prevent people from using parametrize. I don't want to replace the generator with the generator target, I want to make some of its metadata (the

entry_points

defined on the

python_distribution

addressable.

You can use parametrize with generators? IIRC, the only thing you can't parametrize are copied fields in overrides. Everything else should be parametrizable though.

Parametrization is only supported for moved fields, not copied fields: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/blob/e5aff163d367f637720730f853ed07b6557a06fd/src/python/pants/engine/internals/graph.py#L323-L327 I was thinking of structuring it like this:

python_distribution

-> target generator

python_entry_point

-> new target generated by the python_distribution This "generated" target represents a small subset of the metadata recorded on the

python_distribution

, so people could easily run into issues trying to parametrize a field that has nothing to do with the entry points, since effectively only the fields on the "generated" target can be parametrized.