Hey Charlie. With the upcoming Pants 2.0, we added

!

to the

dependencies

field as a way to ignore dependencies from a target. The simplest thing to do would be to write a macro (https://www.pantsbuild.org/v2.0/docs/macros) like

custom_python_binary

and have it always add

'!//:tensorflow'

to the

dependencies

field. —

or transitive dependencies

This is a little trickier. In Pants, creating a custom target type and/or using a macro would only influence the direct dependencies for that target. That is, it would only help to avoid this case:

python_binary(
  dependencies=["bad_dep"]
)

Not this case:

python_library(
  name="util",
  dependencies=["bad_dep"],
)

python_binary(
  dependencies=[":util"],
)

-- But, you could use the Rules API to essentially fork the builtin

binary

implementation. You could do something like check “If the target is a

custom_python_binary

, then no matter what exclude tensorflow; otherwise, use dependencies like normal.” You’d use the builtin rules for everything else like

test

, and swap in your rules that you forked. It sounds like correctly handling transitive deps is important too, right?