When a shell script

pants

that lives in the repo root is updated, how would one force Pants to re-bootstrap itself using the latest file? (see https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/upgrade-tips#check-for-updates-to-the-pants-script). Blowing the

~/.cache/pants

doesn’t feel very friendly 😕 I’m on

2.9.0

and after making changes to the

pants

file that would cause Pants to fail bootstrapping, Pants still runs, ignoring the changes in the

pants

file.

Specifically you could blow

~/.cache/pants/setup

, but I don't see why that would be necessary. What are the changes that Pants is not doing and that you expect it to?

so what I mean is: • having a fresh computer • checkout a Git repo with

pants

script from a few months ago (

pants

file is part of the repo) • run

./pants version

; it bootstraps itself and working • download the latest https://github.com/pantsbuild/setup/blob/gh-pages/pants and re-run

./pants

. It doesn’t use the newly downloaded

pants

file. This can be reproduced by simply making some bogus changes to the script that would cause it to fail, e.g. https://github.com/pantsbuild/setup/blob/gh-pages/pants#L37 set a non-existing version here

Ah, it does execute the new script - but the script is written to short-circuit so you never hit that particular codepath. Adding

set -x

to the top will show you specifically which lines of bash are being executed

ah of course, that was a bit too short-sighted of me, apologies!

No apologies necessary! I'm being pedantic to try to clarify what's happening. But the real answer you were after is

~/.cache/pants/setup

perfect, thank you! So is it safe to assume that users don’t need to nuke

~/.cache/pants/setup

after they pull and get a new version of the

pants

file — it will run and use the latest file, no matter what?

Yes, it is safe to assume that. If we ever make a change to the

./pants

script to no longer install in the same place, we would probably add code to handle that

oh I’ve done that with

ls foo

😄 I can see that it runs, which is great. If there is anything dodgy, I’ll report. And I know what directory to nuke as well. Thanks, Eric, so helpful, as always!