I'm running a patched version to address 14492 and had no problems with pure Python code.

We'd be very happy to have someone implement the rest of 14492, if you're interested in a PR! I landed most the prework I think. I'm happy to add more instructions if you're interested?

pants defers a lot (all?) of the package management to pex.

indeed

So I think what I need to do is figure out what pants is passing to pex to build venvs for test, check, etc, a specific wheels, a dynamic lock file, other?

you can run with

-ldebug

to see the argv we use. You may need to use

--no-local-cache --no-pantsd

to ignore the cache and daemon (memoization)