Another bike shed! A flagship feature for Pants 2.8 is the

overrides

field, which allows you to more easily override metadata for a single file w/o having to define new targets. For example,

overrides={
  "foo_test.py": {"timeout": 120},
  ("bar_test.py", "baz_test.py"): {"timeout": 240},
}

Feedback welcomed on what this syntax should look like: 🧵

What benefit does

override()

provide over the dict syntax?

Zero change in functionality, only a question of what color you prefer to paint the bikeshed. The argument for it is alignment with target syntax of

kwarg="value"

If someone doesn't like the

{"timeout": 240}

dict literal, they can always use

dict(timeout=240)

. So, I think

override()

is a step too far.

Oh that's a great point!

dict literals - each exposure to python and python dialects should nudge people toward good practice.

dict()

is generally bad practice imo.

John Sirois sometimes counter-argues that a benefit of

dict()

it forces the keys to already be

str

, which is important here. But not sure that's worth it

Yeah I don't buy that (about

dict()

helping to enforce string keys). You can validate and throw an error on non string keys, and then you can print a more helpful message than a python syntax error.