Ensure the compiler --release flag if we build with --production

[jwaldrip]

The documentation was misleading. So I thought it would be proper to automatically add the compiler release flag when building with the shards --production flag.

[straight-shoota]

I'm not sure about this. --production affects dependency resolution, --release affects the compiler process. They don't necessarily have the same use cases. For example in testing and staging environments you might want to use --production to resolve dependencies like in production but don't bother about a release build.

[Blacksmoke16]

@straight-shoota It that case they can just do shards install --production. However, by using the build command with --production, IMO the intent is to create a production binary. In which case --release makes sense. I'd also argue that if you're using a binary for use in testing/staging you ought to be using it as you would in production, i.e. with --release.

I just know I fell victim to this as well, thinking it was similar to --prod flags in other langs/build tools. If anything a new flag like --strict would make more sense, where --production is a combination of --strict and --release.

[jhass]

Yes, I think the confusion/wrong expectations here are from its name. Adding --release, renaming --production to --strict or maybe --frozen sounds good to me. And then maybe we can reintroduce --production as a shorthand for the combination of those, at some point.

[asterite]

I think we should have just one flag, either --release or --production that does a combination of those two things (this PR is fine).

It's the same reason why we don't have -O1, -O2, -O3 in the compiler. We just have --release and that means "this is the build that we are going to deploy, and it better be fast". Having just one flag that means that in shards is ideal in my opinion.

I don't understand why you'd want to deploy a non-optimized build in staging. Then QA finds that stuff is slow for no reason, maybe report it... staging and production should be as similar as possible.

[j8r]

I agree with @straight-shoota and @Blacksmoke16 . I would also like to add that the name --production is not a very good name for a flag which installs only "main" libraries (those in the dependencies key).

It think, it would be clearer to do this way: --no-dev: do not install any dev packages (those in in development_dependencies). Or --strict as proposed by @Blacksmoke16 --release: compile in release mode --production: combines both --no-dev and --release