repo-gen? config-gen?

I've been of the opinion its an accident that pants.toml and BUILD are different - they could be the same (easier to imagine .toml files sprinkled instead of the other way around). If that idea has any legs, then buildgen (really tomlgen or configgen) makes sense here.

TOML build files sounds very interesting. It's confusing it's Python now. This also makes IDE integration easier

And ... it proves you're configuring rules since pants.toml only configures ruies / subsystems - aka it underscores targets are dead.

having config that inherits values up the filesystem hierarchy, a la .gitignore or conftest.py is a reasonably well-understood thing too

having config that inherits values up the filesystem hierarchy, a la .gitignore or conftest.py is a reasonably well-understood thing too

Yeah, this is what I'm leaning towards. At least for metadata describing first party code inheriting metadata from ancestor BUILD files for something like a

pex_binary

seems weird. again, for me, there are three categories: 1) first party metadata, 2) third party deps metadata, 3) artifacts metadata. The first one is what's broken imo