Q2: why can't I write

pant test :

when cwd is some subdirectory of my project root, but I can write

dependencies=[":tgt"]

in the same dir's BUILD file?

Currently,

pants

requires you to invoke it from your repo root, so the

cwd

should never be a subdirectory.. There’s been work to explore options to get out of this situation, such as https://github.com/kaos/homebrew-shell/blob/master/Formula/pants.rb See https://pantsbuild.slack.com/archives/C0D7TNJHL/p1644006730554629?thread_ts=1643992726.399819&cid=C0D7TNJHL for usage. Note however that it is an early POC only, and does not yet work well for all use cases.