I was playing around with

--loop

for monitoring file changes (very nice when it works), but discovered a bunch of bugs: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+loop+infinite I filed them as mostly separate issues, since they felt like they might have different causes/resolutions if one was to play whack-a-mole and fix things individually (since, e.g., test failures under

pants --loop test ...

don't get rerun infinitely, so clearly it's doing something special), but potentially there's a single change that'll make `--loop`'s behaviour much nicer globally?

Agree. I’ve long thought about fixing pants loop to detect a few of the cases you mention to avoid looping ad infinitum on unrecoverable errors for instance.