Hi, everyone. I'm just exploring pants on my own for managing my personal projects, which I happen to keep in a monorepo style. I hope, pants will improve build times for me.

Terrific! Feel free to reach out for help here or on GH whenever you need. We're always grateful to have feedback too!

Thank you for your offer. Currently, I'm just reading the docs, looking at the example repositories and do a few simple projects. For now, onboarding feels acceptable, lots of jumping back and forth through the docs. I'm looking at the repositories, primarily and then going line by line through the configs and looking up what things do in the docs.

The bouncing around is not the optimal experience we aspire to. My apologies. @ancient-vegetable-10556 and @hundreds-father-404 happen to be right now working on overhauling the docs to be more approachable for newcomers. So we'd certainly be grateful for any feedback you want to give on what was awkward or unclear. (No pressure though. It's fine if don't do that.)

Indeed! We're doing a mix of docs improvements + engineering work to make onboarding easier. Tracked at https://github.com/orgs/pantsbuild/projects/3

Yeah, maybe an opinionated approach is a better way. My first issue was trying to figure out, how to lay out the repository. I personally have an NVMe mounted into ~/.repository (linux), so I created an out_of_tree directory in the repository root and cloned pants into /out_of_tree/pants, then got the pants_from_source file and (first mistake) renamed it to pants and then realizing i cannot rename it back to pants_from_sources again after running pants for the first time.

Thanks! I agree that starting with an opinionated approach is kindest to a newcomer. As someone gets more comfortable with Pants' many options, they need us to just make it easy to find options and make their own choices. But when someone is brand-new to a system with a lot of dials to turn, yeah simple is best.