#9736 Break out a `pantsbuild.pants.api` dist. Issue created by jsirois People wishing to extend Pants with plugins must use APIs embedded in the

pantsbuild.pants

distribution. That distribution contains much more than a plugin author needs including 3rdparty dependencies that are "fake" (they are not dependencies of the API) and yet still constrain the plugin author's code base. We should maintain a

pantsbuild.pants.api

distribution that contains just the code and dependencies needed to write a plugin. Plugin authors can depend on just that distribution. An example of the current bandaiding that's needed is in #9735. pantsbuild/pants