Add --[no-]remote-execution flag

[Eric-Arellano]

Problem

We want to allow users to permanently configure all remoting options in their pants.ini, without that config triggering Pants always using remoting. Tangibly, we are trying to land #7990 to setup our own usage and can't get green CI because Pants is trying to remote things it shouldn't.

Instead, users should be able to turn on remoting at the per-invocation level, just like we have --enable-pantsd.

Solution

Introduce --[no-]remote-execution. For now, this defaults to False as this is an alpha feature and it does not work without other remoting config.

Result

Users can have all their remoting config setup and still be able to entirely run locally. Also now more explicit when you are and are not remoting.

[stuhood]

Thanks. Please wait for a sanity check from @illicitonion before merging.

[illicitonion]

This works for me, but it may be worth thinking about whether this is really a boolean, or will be an enum in the future? In particular, when speculation is a thing, will we want:
--remote-execution --speculate-execution
or will we want
--execution-strategy={local,remote,speculative,...}
?

[Eric-Arellano]

In particular, when speculation is a thing, will we want: ... --execution-strategy={local,remote,speculative}

That approach sounds great to me! Default to local.

Though, this assumes that there are instances where users would only want to remote and not speculate? Do we anticipate that being the case?

--

Closely related, in Slack Stu mentioned the option for the speculate timeout threshold. I think that is should be separate from this option here, but this is one possible way of doing this:

./pants --remoting --speculation-local-timeout=0 to mean always remote, don't speculate.

--

cc @stuhood @hrfuller

[stuhood]

This works for me, but it may be worth thinking about whether this is really a boolean, or will be an enum in the future? In particular, when speculation is a thing, will we want:
--remote-execution --speculate-execution
or will we want
--execution-strategy={local,remote,speculative,...}
?

There was some discussion of this in slack (here), and my takeaway was that if remoting is enabled, we should have a good set of defaults for that case which will include speculation (by default). So I leaned toward the boolean flag.

[Eric-Arellano]

my takeaway was that if remoting is enabled, we should have a good set of defaults for that case which will include speculation (by default). So I leaned toward the boolean flag.

Agreed. If you have remoting, by default it makes sense to have speculation also enabled.

So long as we have some mechanism to turn off speculation, which we can do via something like --speculation-local-timeout=0.

[illicitonion]

I'm largely indifferent on the boolean vs enum question, happy to do whatever other people prefer :)