Pants expects a 'pants.ini' file even when passed a PANTS_CONFIG_OVERRIDE

[mateor]

EDIT:

The original issue is below, John clarified to me that this is indeed the intended behavior. I am reframing this as a documentation request. The doc page that deals with pants.ini says that you should have a file called pants.ini and is regularly says things to the effect of "In your config file (usually pants.ini),..."

In actuality,

1. There must be a file called exactly 'pants.ini' and
2. It will be interpolated at the beginning of every run, no matter whether the user sets PANTS_CONFIG_OVERRIDE or not.

I knew that there had to be an ini file, but the specific requirements above might be a nice addition to the doc page.

ORIGINAL ISSUE

To reproduce this issue,

mateo:pants mateo$ cat pants-other.ini
[DEFAULT]
pants_version: 0.0.57
mateo:pants mateo$ PANTS_CONFIG_OVERRIDE="['pants-other.ini']" ./pants --version
0.0.57
mateo:pants mateo$ mv pants.ini pantss.ini
mateo:pants mateo$ PANTS_CONFIG_OVERRIDE="['pants-other.ini']" ./pants --version
/Users/mateo/dev/pants/src/python/pants/base/build_environment.py:36: DeprecationWarning: BaseException.message has been deprecated as of Python 2.6
  print(e.message, file=sys.stderr)
Could not find pants.ini!
mateo:pants mateo$

I came across this because I am now convinced that pants is still interpolating anything it find in pants.ini for every single run, even if the PANTS_CONFIG_OVERRIDE is set, e.g. the following two commands are equivalent:

PANTS_CONFIG_OVERRIDE="['pants-other.ini']" ./pants --version
PANTS_CONFIG_OVERRIDE="['pants.ini', 'pants-jenkins.ini']" ./pants --version

This may be by design, it does say OVERRIDE. But I contend that if I pass a program a different config file than the default, I no longer expect the default settings to be applied. If you disagree, feel free to mark wontfix or close, I have already worked around this internally.

[jsirois]

Confirming the behavior you describe, override only - is the designed/intended behavior. You may want to rephrase the issue in terms of a new feature idea for PANTS_CONFIG_(REPLACE) or else a documentation clarification ticket.

[mateor]

Okay, will do, thanks john.

[mateor]

Okay, I updated the issue with the following header.
"The original issue is below, John clarified to me that this is indeed the intended behavior. I am reframing this as a documentation request. The doc page that deals with pants.ini says that you should have a file called pants.ini and is regularly says things to the effect of "In your config file (usually pants.ini),..."

In actuality,

1. There must be a file called exactly 'pants.ini' and
2. It will be interpolated at the beginning of every run, no matter whether the user sets PANTS_CONFIG_OVERRIDE or not.

I knew that there had to be an ini file, but the specific requirements above might be a nice addition to the doc page.
"

[mateor]

Larry came by and updated the docs for us! He closed this issue in the commit message, I am unsure why it is still open. Closing.