@hundreds-father-404 is there a way to tell the flake8 linter to ignore whole directories (i.e. pants targets), configuring excludes in the flake8 config file pants uses has no effect since in v2, pants passed a list of .py files for flake8 to process.

Hm, can you share more about the use case, please? The way we achieve this in the Pants code base is via tags. For every target you wan to skip, add something like this:

python_library(
  tags=['nolint']
)

Then

./tc --tags='-nolint' lint ::

yes, I am looking into vendoring an external package into our repo. under src/python/some_package I want to take it "as is", I don't mind re-formatting it with black, but I don't want to go and fix all the other lint and perhaps typing (mypy) issues it has... so I want pants to ignore it for certain checks (specifically flake8 & mypy)

you can name the tag whatever you want, so long as you use a convention