In order to make some moves on auto-generating shell completions (https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/16315)... I was waiting until we have time to think a bit more about how

export

should work, and then see if we can build an option to generate completions, as well as a venv. I'm on the fence about whether this is better or worse, but using

export

(or any goal) feels more like... dunno... I always associate those to targets and production code (and `export`ing a dev env to help out), while completions are related to the Pants tooling itself. So what about doing something more like

--version

?

./pants --completions

?

There's an open ticket to auto-update venvs when reqs change. I'm wondering if we can do the same here. Enable an option then any pants command implicitly updates the completion file?

Oooh, yes, that's exactly what I'd want - I was thinking it would have to go in the pants script, which is blah

(Benjy is OOO this week.) @witty-crayon-22786 thoughts?

So what about doing something more like

--version

?

./pants --completions

?

this would work too probably. goals don’t have access to the help APIs in general, but “BuiltinGoals” do. so a

./pants completions

would be possible.

One of the discussions in the github ticket was avoiding proliferation of goals, hence why

export

+ option was a nice thing... I can proto a builtin, and then we can decide if it makes sense?