Tested this key in relation to https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-13411 and it looks like adding to buuld command makes build (w/o running tests) twice faster for me.
Beware that this does not disable local p2 cache, so if your first build did redownload most dependencies, and the second could get them from cache, it could be a reason why you save time, independently of -Dtycho.localArtifacts=ignore.
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Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
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