Although this code hasn't been touched in a long time, I was doing some cleaning in my github repo and saw that this batch of code was sitting around with no explaination. -Eric.

This project is an extraction of a tool used at Square circa 2017 to automatically generate BUILD files from Maven pom.xml files. There were several contributors at Square to this codebase.

The "squarepants" tool was integrated into the Square monorepo when it was still primarily running Maven that allowed users to try pants, and for me to start generating builds and testing them out. This subset of the tool was uploaded as an example for others in the Pants community who expressed interest in building a tool of their own.
It is not a usable product in this state and does not run out of the box.
It is likely far out of date with Pants 2.0.

The useful parts of this codebase are the parts that parse the pom.xml files, understand the dependencies between projects, and translate parts of the pom.xml into BUILD file constructs. The Square repo had a sophisticated use of Maven that tied together versions from many projects into common settings which we used to generate a 3rdparty/BUILD file. It also had a somewhat complex generation of proto definitions that were pulled in from a .jar file collected from many repos (external-protos/).