internally, we'd see

python_dist()

compilation fail, but the errors were just encoding errors when pex printed directly to stderr (meaning we couldn't see the error at all, we saw the exception message the encoding error while printing) -- this was a very annoying problem that kris fixed immediately (by googling it, lol, also bc he's a genius) by setting

LC_ALL=C

so gcc doesn't use smart quotes (((((lol))))), but like i feel in those two cases there's this """impedance mismatch""" (i've never used that word before and unclear if it applies) between pex as a cli tool and pex as a library and i'm talking specifically about writing directly to stderr -- the above error is one i caused, but that write error without even checking if the file is closed means i need to resort to a hack to view my real error