I want to add some custom checking on a project's dependencies (look for illegal and unused ones, for example). I can do it with a script that calls pants repeatedly and processes the results, but it is slow to do that many times. Is a linter plugin the right thing to do instead?

Can you give an example more specifically of how that would look? Are you referring to 3rd party deps? Or, similar to this slack chat directly above? https://pantsbuild.slack.com/archives/C046T6T9U/p1666860531191969

Yes, that is almost the same thing. Reading the referenced discussions, I think using ValidateDependenciesRequest should be a solution. At this moment, I don't care about a generic solution, just good enough for me. And also trying to get my feet wet with writing a plugin.

Worth mentioning ValidateDependenciesRequest doesn't have a dedicated goal where it runs. It'll just run whenever dependencies are requested for some reason. Which usually happens at typechecking/test time anyways 😊

You can also, at the extreme, run

./pants peek ::

, which dumps a big JSON blob with, among other things, all the deps in the repo, which you can then post-process. Not as good, but means you don’t have to call Pants repeatedly

I thought about that, but ideally a plugin is best because I don't need a script to call ./pants lint and my validator together, and pants' nice uniform UI goes away. On the other hand, I didn't get the feeling that plugin development is for the weak of heart 🙂

It will put hair on your chest, yeah 🙂

Then you can improve it and break everyone else. Earning them chest hair. Great fun!

The circle of dev