I think its semantics are broken currently. Imo,

./pants test project/tests.py:tgt '!project/tests.py'

should result in no targets matched. But it doesn't! The ignore spec does nothing. In the design doc, I propose that we should have ignore options for every spec type, so you can do

dir:: '!dir/but_not_me::'

. That is consistent and powerful I think we need to do that as a holistic project for "ignore specs" tho. The status quo is broken

Trying to accomdate

FilesystemIgnoreSpec

is making this project really hard for me to reason about and implement So, I'm proposing that we simply remove the feature...it's incomplete and I expect not widely used. We never document it anywhere

fyi design doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WWQM-X6kHoSCKwItqf61NiKFWNSlpnTC5QNu3ul9RDk/edit#heading=h.1h4j0d5mazhu

and to clarify, current semantics == when you use a

FileLiteralSpec

or

FileGlobSpec

, the

FileIgnoreSpec

will filter out the file beforehand. It has no impact on

AddressSpecs

, which I think it should

(or at least I don't 😛 )