Known apparently: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/5282 But this works:

$ PANTS_BINARIES_BASEURLS="['bob']" ./pants options | grep baseurls
binaries_baseurls = ['bob'] (from ENVIRONMENT from env var PANTS_BINARIES_BASEURLS)

i have had a real fix for this with tests and whatnot for a bit on my laptop — but just now at scale by the bay i had a chat with someone (who’s username i can’t find) about a way they had proposed to decouple the arg parsing logic from pants entirely which would be a better approach than what i had i think. i’m going to play around with some code first but not having this option working on the command line has potentially stopped a huge number of people from using pants at day 1