Ergonomic, hermetic, user-friendly software build system for Python, Go, Java, Kotlin, Protobuf, Scala, Shell. Pants lets you fearlessly scale up your codebase!

Pants

What would people think of Pants adding an automated mechanism to validate that artifacts built with `./pants package` are valid? For example, something like this:

```pex_binary(name="main", entry_point="main.py", validate_argv=["--help"])```
Then Pants would run `dist/../main.pex --help` for you as part of `./pants package`

The validation would probably need to be pretty simplistic, something you can express in a BUILD file like the `argv: list[str]`. I think we'd want the mechanism to be really accessible to use, rather than requiring writing a plugin

But we could maybe add a plugin hook for more complex situations

Nvm! I forgot about <https://www.pantsbuild.org/docs/python-test-goal#depending-on-packages>, and I think this probably intersects too closely with that to be worth another mechanism

thanks for opening the topic, I wasn’t aware of that feature :slightly_smiling_face:

I definitely think we need to do a better job documenting it, especially by cross referencing it in the docs on packaging / pex

It's a super cool feature, one of the coolest Pants offers imo! props to <@U051221NF>