@Kyle Larose, yeah, I hear you. I haven’t found a neat way to do this too. I’ll share my workflow below that seems to work for me most of the time:
1. Build the distribution target once on a branch.
2. Then to test any incremental changes on the same branch, I’d selectively build the modules that’ve changed (skipping UTs and static checks) and then copy the target jar(s) into the distribution folder and restart Druid.
In practice, I find this more efficient than doing a full distribution build especially when the changes touch only a few modules. I have a small script to do this but it’s so hacky and doesn’t work well for extensions etc. 😅
Maybe someone has better ideas here :)