Is there an easy way to tell pants to ignore symlinks when doing

lint

. It seems black/isort end up turning the symlink into a copy of the file it links to if they are run on the file and need to make changes

Interesting use case! So you have a .py file that is a symlink to another .py file in, presumably, another directory, and the symlink is owned by some

python_sources

target?

Yes, A symlink in directory A to a python file in directory B. In both directories there is a

python_sources

target that owns the file or symlink as well as a pex_binary target (since the symlinked file is a script entrypoint)

Sounds like Undefined Behavior, I'm not sure what Pants should be doing here? What would you expect?

I would expect any files that are symlinks to still be symlinks after running

pants fmt

. It would be fine for it to just ignore it in this case (since we will also be `fmt`ing it’s target. It would also be acceptable for pants to write to the target of the symlink if it wants to make changes when processing the target which is a target

I think replacing a symlink with a file is definitely not undefined behavior - it's definitely always the wrong thing to do.

I’ll pull together a minimal example and submit a bug

We could either skip formatting symlinks, or format the underlying file