Brainstorm: We currently have elementary support for the

package

goal running existing

setup.py

files in the repo. But there is an issue with the cwd:

VenvPexProcess

is currently set up to run with the cwd as the sandbox root. But handwritten

setup.py

files are usually authored under the assumption that the

cwd

is wherever the

setup.py

is. This affects what relpaths in

setup.py

are relative to, for example. It seems like the right thing to do is to set

working_directory

on the underlying

Process

to wherever

setup.py

is. I've tried this, but unfortunately the

VenvPexProcess

shim script machinery doesn't like it. We could strip the relevant prefix so that

setup.py

ends up in the root, under the reasonable assumption that everything it references is under it in the repo. However this causes issues with capturing the output of running

setup.py develop

which writes in unpredictable locations under the cwd. So we'd have to capture the entire sandbox as output (this currently fails, due to absolute symlinks in the pex cache dir, but we could fix that I imagine). Any thoughts on which is the right way to go? Could the Pex/VenvPex machinery be easily made to support running from a cwd other than the root, or is that just asking for trouble?

if setting working directory doesn't work today that's a bug.

Right, I plumbed it

Excellent - thank you.

Turned out to be not that hard to get it working: https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/12347