I’m working on a task to create symlinks to classes folders for targets from

pants_distdir

. It is required for the IntelliJ Pants plugin because it needs to know where are

*.class

files are stored for a particular target. With recent changes for incremental caches these paths are no longer stable from run to run. During implementing this new task to create symlinks I faced a few design dilemmas. First, we do replace

classes_dir

with

jar_file

in

runtime_classpath

product. Also I want to make this task smarter by changing symlinks only for changed targets, in order to do so I will need to know invalid targets and output folders for them. I came up only with one solution for the problem. A new product that will contain

classes

folders for newly compiled targets.

jvm_compile

will populate the product that will be consumed by my task.