I'm working on splitting up a local release build from the official CI release build. I'm not sure how we'd want to handle the defaults though. Either we could make the default the fast local one - so that anyone who pulls down

main

and just runs

pants --version

has a good experience, and then we environment variable away the

CI

build (which takes much longer, and would be slightly faster - but it's in CI, so whatever) This is a "breaking" change of sorts, as anyone else building Pants for whatever reason (internally, for their own perf testing, etc, etc) would have a slower runtime experience, and would have to opt-into the "yet faster" change. For anyone using our official releases, though, they would be fine either way. If we're okay with the breaking change concept in order to make life easier for local dev, then my immediate follow-up would be ... why not default to debug/dev builds locally, always, instead of opting into that? So, in short, ignoring the details of how Cargo, how our local scripts work, and the specific naming - we have these 3-ish scenarios:

MODE=debug
MODE=semi-release
MODE=release

So, the question is, which is the default for when we type

pants --version

while doing local mainline development

I don't think I know enough about rust/cargo land to even know what we do today