#6676 Better support refactoring of targets that `provide` Issue created by jsirois on <!date^1540402165^{date_short}|2018-10-24T17:29:25Z> One strength of pants is that it makes it fairly easy to create fine grained targets. When the targets are internal - just used by pants for building and tests - pants adjusts to changes in target contents (target becomes fatter or thinner) seamlessly, allowing the developer to do the right thing. Unfortunately, once a target is published, there is a third party involved that cannot handle the refactoring - the artifact resolver in play. At this point you would hope Pants either: a. Provide useful friction to the refactor of the providing target to highlight the issues ahead. b. Provide support for publishing and/or consuming the refactored artifacts in a safe way c. Decouple target granularity from publish granularity At the time of writing, Pants provides oblique, un-useful friction, forcing the aggregator to own a dummy file; IOW a bad version of 'a'. It would be novel to support 'b' somehow. The python stack supports c but the jvm stack does not, see below: #6676 (comment) pantsbuild/pants