on the topic of packaging a pants pex and distributing pants as a pex (https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/12397) would that mean that we could have a “pants binary” installed on the system rather than relying on a “bootstrap”

./pants

script in every repo?

We could do that regardless of distribution method.

Perhaps it doesn’t give you much, as each project may not use the same version of pants any way… ?

Not sure, but you would still need "install right version and reexec" logic to handle that.

Yeah, I think the benefit of distributing Pants as a standalone binary (with an embedded interpreter, ideally) is avoiding bootstrapping flakiness. I think you'd still want a wrapper script to select the Pants version for the repo.

you could get rid of the wrapper script, at least the need to have one in every repo, by having a shim on the path, that forwards your request to the appropriate pants binary. Thinking a little like how pyenv selects your version of python to use, for instance..

@curved-television-6568: but that would mean that you’d have a separate install and upgrade step for the shim, independent of the per-repo step

that would mean that you’d have a separate install and upgrade step for the shim

true, that’s 👎

i suppose though that it’s already the case that the

pants

script itself periodically needs upgrade

hmm.. there’s a tradeoff between having the wrapper script per repo or per machine..