#8992 Provide mechanism to discover available backend_packages Issue created by Eric-Arellano We're moving in the direction of Pants no longer registering all of its plugins by default and instead requiring users to opt-in. For example, you must explicitly opt in to

pants.backend.python.lint.isort

in V2, whereas V1 has

pants.backend.python

activated by default. However, there is no good way to discover the possible backends outside of looking at the source code for this project. We should likely add a new goal like

./pants backends

which will scan for all the

register.py

files to discover them and provide useful descriptions to the user. Likely,

register.py

files should start to have module-level docstring that gets used for the output of

./pants backends

. This feature should be able to distinguish between

backend_packages

vs.

backend_packages2

. pantsbuild/pants

#8992 Provide mechanism to discover available backend_packages Issue closed as completed by AlexTereshenkov pantsbuild/pants