#22394 Crash on macOS due to recursive terminfo symlink in bundled Python (PBS) Issue created by jasonwbarnett Describe the bug One of our developers encountered a crash after upgrading from Pants 2.24.1 to 2.26.0. The process fails with the following error:

native_engine.IntrinsicError: Error opening file /private/var/folders/.../pants-sandbox-.../python/share/terminfo/n/ncr260vt300wpp for writing: Os { code: 62, kind: FilesystemLoop, message: "Too many levels of symbolic links" }

We traced this to a recursive symlink (

ncr260vt300wpp

) in the Pants sandbox, which appears to come from the embedded Python used by Pants (Python Build Standalone / PBS). This issue only affects one developer on macOS out of ~50 users, but is consistently reproducible on that machine. The root cause appears to be a bug in the PBS release that Pants is currently pinned to: astral-sh/python-build-standalone#231 Upgrading the PBS version manually via

[python-bootstrap.internal_python_build_standalone_info]

resolves the issue. Pants version 2.26.0 OS macOS (Apple Silicon) Additional info • Affected rule:

Install Python for Pants usage

• Resolved by overriding PBS version with the 20250517 release • Issue was very difficult to debug without realizing Pants wasn’t using system Python but PBS • Recommend upgrading default PBS version in Pants repo Let me know if logs, sandbox contents, or the reproduction environment would be helpful. pantsbuild/pants