#17926 Allow source(s) targets to specify sources from places other than the filesystem Issue created by chrisjrn In the discussion around #17877, an alternative syntax for wrapping outputs of targets was proposed:

experimental_shell_command(
  name='cmd',
  ..,
)

python_sources(
  sources=output_sources(":cmd"),
)

The goal here would be to make the `source`(

s

) field on various target (generators) support values other than just strings that specify files/globs. Prior art for this exists in the form of

AssetSourceField

, which can be specified as an

http_source

(which supports downloading a file with a known URL and sha256 value). The main difference from

http_source

is that this feature would be designed to support values that can supply multiple source files, and would therefore need to make sense in the context of target generation. A number of technical issues that would impact the design of this are discussed in the thread -- particularly in the context of dependency inference -- at #17877 (comment) pantsbuild/pants