better way to differentiate development and production builds

[BugenZhao]

Sometimes, we may expect different behaviors in development and production builds for various reasons:

• provide better developer experience, like unlocking all paid features by default for developers (feat: introduce license manager and feature tiers #17396)
• experimental features that can be tested internally but are not exposed to users

Currently the best way to differentiate them is through the compiling flag of debug_assertions, given that it's a common convention in Rust to differentiate dev and release profile. This works adequately, but it could be improved further.

• when we are going to run tests on optimized builds, we should pay special attention to using ci-release (which enables debug_assertions intentionally) instead of release profile
• end-to-end benchmarks, which directly operate on the release/nightly docker images for production usages, are not able to leverage those development-only features

It would be better if we can find a better way to do this.

Note that we are mainly focusing on the compile-time flag here over runtime flag (like args, configuration, or env vars), in order to build a stricter boundary.

---

You reminds me of this: https://github.com/tikv/tikv/blob/master/etc/cargo.config.dist "really prod/dist config" (e.g., fat LTO) vs "release/bench" config. I also wanted a "release without LTO" before, because LTO compiles for too long. 🤣

Originally posted by @xxchan in #17396 (comment)

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