Hi, I'm an absolute beginner to pants and would like to use it for python projects, so to get a better understanding how it works I'm trying to build the python examples at https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/tree/master/examples/src/python/example But when running

./pants binary examples/src/python/example/hello/main

I get

FAILURE: Problem locating a java distribution: Failed to locate a JDK distribution with minimum_version None, maximum_version None

I'm running Ubuntu 18 and have OpenJDK installed. The only related issue I could find is https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/3815, but this was closed as fixed. Did I miss something?

Hi Joerg! Welcome. Sorry for that negative first experience. It sounds like you’re using the older docs. We’ve been rewriting them from the ground up at https://pants.readme.io/docs/welcome-to-pants. They reference an example Python repo, which will be much better to play around with Pants than using the Pants repository itself (which would require you to compile Rust to build Pants’s engine, rather than using a prebuilt asset). We are very soon going to make it more clear that the old docs are superseded by the new ones. To clarify, you do not need a JDK to use pants. That is only for the internal Pants repository.

Great, thanks, I'll have a look! I found the repo mentioned in the new docs very hard to find via google. Even searching for the url https://github.com/pantsbuild/example-python literally, the first hits i get are referring to https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/tree/master/examples/src/python/example This is actually how I ended up there :-)

Indeed, our SEO is messed up from ~8 years going to the old thing + comparing with the article of clothing 🤦‍♂️ Fwit, we are likely going to very soon delete those old examples and more aggressively refer the old site to the new site. We’re in the works for preparing Pants 2.0