Riffing off of @fast-nail-55400 question ☝🏽, but not wanting to hijack thread: will this proposed

FileDigest

handle different file types, like symbolic links, sockets, etc or just text and binary files? I don't see a reason why it would, but if you do, then whatever the solution should be able to intuitively encompass filesytem api's.

Yeah, we handle symbolic links. Although I don’t think it currently tells you it’s a symbolic link, nor is there a first class API to create them. https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/blob/daaf30fb873b7dbd0ea56846174eca6ffe3db3da/src/python/pants/engine/fs_test.py#L297-L304 I’m not sure about any support for sockets - I don’t think we have anything like that

note that the Remote Execution API only supports files, directories, and symbolic links. and the

Process

type in Pants models things similarly