I'm finally splitting up a big-ol' BUILD file with lots of recursive targets and overrides. Is there some automated tooling to help with this? Like maybe we could steal some Bazel tools. Or will I need to just need to process this myself?

deleting the file and then running

./pants tailor ::

should do 95% of it?

yeah... but I want to move the extensive overrides to the new BUILD files 😕

yeah... but I want to move the extensive overrides to the new BUILD files

ah.

I think i'm just gonna

eval()

the build file with the generators aliased to something that collects the data... then I can process the overrides with pathlib, add those build files first, then do

./pants tailor

to fill in the normal stuff

Bazel's

buildozer

might help. I've used it on Pants BUILD files for automated refactoring: https://github.com/bazelbuild/buildtools/blob/master/buildozer/README.md

@fresh-cat-90827 blogged about this! https://blog.pantsbuild.org/updating-pants-build-files-programmatically/

would Jedi (https://jedi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#) be useful? It powers some Python LSP servers and other tools.

Or rope! https://github.com/python-rope/rope

This stuff would be interesting but the hard part is merging overrides... evaling the build file is pretty easy, as you can just pass globals for all the target types it uses and replace them with a function that collects the kwargs. I'll post a snippet when I'm done