AH, yeah - agreed somewhat. The option scoping is regular but mysterious. When you say

test

, that implies test tasks for a whole bunch of languages Pants supports (try

./pants --explain tests

). So, for example, test.pytest and test.junit. The former tests python code, the latter jvm code using the junit runner. Options are scoped to goal, task. So --test-pytest means this is an option bound for the

pytest

task in the

test

goal. The rest, junit-xml-dir - is the actual option name.