Looking at the help for PHP Composer's install command, I see the following two options

$ composer help install
Options:
 --prefer-source            Forces installation from package sources when possible, including VCS information.
 --prefer-dist              Forces installation from package dist even for dev versions.

What's a "dist" installation? I poked around the composer site and Google but there didn't seem to be anything that addressed this (So I assume it's something core and obvious to folks familiar with Composer — apologies for the newbie question)

I'm assuming --prefer-source is where Composer will ask Packagist for the repository location, and then checkout/clone/export/etc. the project itself.

If so, then where does --prefer-dist download from? What does it download?

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