What's needed?

It is difficult to use the current targets, defined as TargetComponents = list[int] | list[ComponentCategory], because the match statement (and isinstance() can't deal with containers, so we can check that something is a list but not that is a list[int]. We had issues in the past getting this right and we still do.

Proposed solution

Use wrapper classes, and then the match syntax should work (I think, untested):

class TargetIds(list[int]): pass
class TargetCategories(list[ComponentCategory]): pass
TargetComponents: TypeAlias = TargetIds | TargetCategories

match components:
    case TargetIds() as component_ids:
        print("components to %s", component_ids)
    case TargetCategories() as categories:
        print("components to %s", categories)
    case unsupported:
        assert_never(unsupported)

While we are it, maybe we can even change this to use frozenset instead of list to make it clear there should be no duplicates.

Use cases

No response

Alternatives and workarounds

Another option could be to make TargetComponents a class and have methods to check which (ids or categories) are really present, but I think it will be more implementation boileplate, and a unsafer usage (as it would be hard to get exhaustion checks in case more ways to specify targets are added in the future).

Additional context

No response