For my next "goal" with pants (pun intended 😉), I need to replace an old Makefile lint target that uses some ugly

find ... | xargs -0 cat | grep ...

commands to ensure that certain python modules do not import others. The purpose is to prevent circular dependencies, or to make sure that a client lib does not accidentally depend on server libs that don't get released. So, are there any pants goodies to help with circular dependency linting?

While I've personally never used it, I think someone made (or worked on) a plugin for

import-linter

https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/15247

This longstanding issue is relevant: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/13393

Which is getting a PR soon!

Hmm. That's backwards from how I was thinking about the import rules. It provides an allow-list approach, but I was thinking in terms of a disallow-list.

@proud-dentist-22844 Would

import-linter

(https://pypi.org/project/import-linter/) solve your problems? Curious if there is extra value in trying to get it running with pants, after the PR is merged

The contract modelling of

import-linter

sounds like just the thing, but I would rather have something that just reuses

pants

dependency graph instead of re-doing all of that work.

@proud-dentist-22844 PR is still open. Your voice matters 😉

The syntax will use specs, so a disallow list will be totally valid. Circular deps not so much though…

Oh! After staring at a diagram of dependencies that I made (manually some time ago, before I found pants), I think I see how I can reverse how I was thinking about things. The current grep-based lint does: This module should not import any of these other modules. Visibility would say: This module is

<private>

which implicitly prevents the other module from importing it.