because we don’t have https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/10842, there is no built in way to grab a file from an absolute path. to do it, you need to: 1. mark your

@rule

uncacheable, either via its output type being

EngineAwareReturnType.cacheable=False

, or by marking

@_uncacheable_rule

2. use Python’s file API to load the file

and even then: it cannot have a declared

dependency

in the

./pants dependencies

sense, because you won’t be able to create a target for something outside the repo.

maybe i need to think about this another way .. but i might as well step back a few

i’m looking for a way to integrate nix with pants — i.e, i want to let nix handle builds of software and assist in providing the shell setup to run certain commands, or ensure certain tools are in PATH .. similar to shell commands, i want tools to be provided/built by nix … my main problem is i want to cache the “result” of nix expressions while tracking the dependencies with pants so it knows when the deps of the nix expressions has been changed if that makes any sense at all — don’t know if you’re familiar with nix or how it works

and just now — if i can just do everything with flakes, i’ll get a lockfile — which can likely be used for the exact purpose i’m looking for, where it can be a regular dependency within the project …

1. is subject to https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/10769 and https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/12203 , because we don’t currently deeply fingerprint

PATH

entries

2. is more like what i mentioned above